Waiting to Vanish

by Ann Hood

  “I’m leaving these,” John-Glenn said.

  Hope turned.

  He stood in the living room, surrounded by his butterflies, stacks of them, layer after layer of velvet colors, their wings spread and tacked.

  “Leaving them?” she said.

  His whole life had been spent with these butterflies. Catching them, labeling them, affixing them to the boards. He had files on all of them. Once he had told her he was going to go to Indonesia where the world’s biggest butterflies lived. He had saved pennies for months, filled empty mayonnaise and Ragu jars with pennies.

  “They’re all dead,” he said.

  “But they’ve always been dead.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t want them.”

  “All right,” she said, and she looked out the window again.

  In her suitcase, wrapped in tissue, she had all the framed photographs from the mantel. Alexander and Grammie, frozen forever in life, captured in short instants—at Christmas, in a Little League game, sitting in a favorite chair.

  “Tell me again,” John-Glenn said.

  Hope hesitated. All these years she told him Ricardo was dead. Now, here they were, ready to go off with him on his Caribbean tour. You have haunted me like a ghost, Ricardo had told her yesterday morning in his hotel room. She had run her fingers over his hairy body, the hair thick and black and curly. Since you left, she’d told him, I’ve felt like a ghost. His mouth tasted the same as always, of cigars and strong coffee. He still wore a lime-scented cologne. She had been afraid lying there with him, that when he left her again, she would truly fade away.

  All of her life she’d been the odd one, shadowed by a strong mother and a sister, beautiful and smart. She had been, always, the most alive with Ricardo. Come with me on this tour, he’d said. His hand had drawn small circles on her stomach as he talked. The islands’ names sounded magical. Barbados and Antigua and Curaçao. She’d imagined palm trees and drinks served in coconuts. Giant seashells, delicate and pink and perfectly shaped, each elaborate curve holding the ocean inside.

  “Well,” Hope said to John-Glenn, “there was a plane crash and they thought Ricardo had been killed—”

  “But really it was someone else. Right?”

  When she’d come home yesterday and had told John-Glenn the news, he’d wanted to write to the children of singers who had died in plane crashes. Maybe your father is alive too, he wanted to tell them. Check with the authorities. He’d shown her a list. Buddy Holly. Ricky Nelson. Jim Croce. She’d felt guilty then for the lie.

  “Did John Lennon die in a plane crash?” John-Glenn asked her. He stood beside her at the window, both of them looking out at the snowy parking lot. The sun reflected on the snow like tinsel on a Christmas tree.

  “No,” she said.

  “Did Paul McCartney?”

  “Paul McCartney’s alive.”

  “He is?”

  Hope remembered something once, Alexander trying to play a record backwards. “I Am a Walrus”? Somewhere it said that Paul was dead.

  “Maybe not,” she said. “I can’t remember.”

  John-Glenn glanced back at the butterflies. A note he laid on top said—“FOR SAM.” Hope touched him, rested her hand on his. They stood like that, gazing out, waiting, long after it grew dark, after the bright lights flashed on in the mall parking lot. Above them, the moon was a milky white sliver. Neither of them spoke. They just kept waiting.

  In her mind, Hope said the names of the islands again. Barbados. Antigua. Curaçao. She imagined a balmy night, Ricardo Havana and the Hoochie-Coo’s on stage, and Ricardo looking right at her as he sang. “Say, it’s only a paper moon, sailing over a cardboard sea. But it wouldn’t be make believe if you believed in me.”

  Jams had a lot to do. He had to talk to Patty and her husband about buying the house. He had to pack his things and call his brother in Pennsylvania. The hardware business was what he knew and what he was going back to. Nuts, bolts, two-by-fours. Jams could see himself already in one of the Porter Hardware Stores, could smell the scent of sawdust and new wood.

  One more thing to do first, though.

  Ursula’s new house was small and painted dark green. It sat in a circle of houses around a tiny pond, covered with ice that shone black-blue in the night.

  She came to the door wearing new jeans and a V-neck sweater, the same orange as her hair. She was barefoot, and her toenails were round, painted the color of cranberries.

  “Hi,” she said.

  The house had all the smells of newness—floor wax and fresh paint. Unpacked boxes were pushed into one corner. On the coffee table were a bottle of wine and two glasses.

  “Nice place,” Jams said, uncertain of what else to say.

  He felt awkward around her. And old, embarrassed by the memory of their kisses.

  She motioned toward the couch, and he sat, watching as she poured the wine. A California chardonnay. He imagined Cal out there, sipping the same wine.

  “So you’re leaving the hospital too,” she said.

  “I’m going back to Pennsylvania. Out of retirement and into the old family business. I never knew too much about liquor anyway.”

  She nodded.

  He thought she looked sad. He tilted her face up.

  “Hey, there,” he said.

  “I was just getting to know you,” she said.

  Her perfume was sweet and heavy, like honey.

  “I’m an old guy,” he said.

  As he said it, he thought of himself in a singles bar, surrounded by other wifeless men, buying white wine spritzers for women who took Chinese cooking classes and Club Med vacations.

  “I haven’t been alone for over thirty years,” he said.

  “She’s really not coming back? I mean, I know women her age who go to find themselves for a while. But they come back.”

  He wanted to say that Cal had found herself long ago. But he just shrugged.

  “I’m going to LA, like I told you,” she said.

  Jams realized he still held her chin cupped in his hand. He found himself wondering what her body was like, all plump, and white with orange freckles everywhere. So opposite of Cal, of what he’d known for so long.

  “The game show,” he said.

  She nodded, her face sinking deeper into his hand.

  “You’ll win.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I don’t know.”

  “No. You will.”

  Her freckles were mesmerizing.

  “If I connected these dots,” he said, tracing the freckles along one cheek, “what would I find? The shape of Florida? A hitchhiker’s thumb?”

  She put her hand on top of his as he moved along her face.

  “You’d find,” she said, “a broken heart.”

  He was surprised, later, to learn that she was forty. That’s okay, he thought. Then he had stopped thinking about it, and lost himself in her whiteness. She was soft everywhere, like a cloud, like angels’ hair. He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d made love. An image of Cal came to him only once, when he first entered Ursula. In it, Cal was flushed and smiling, her head turned away from him.

  “There are trains to Philly,” he said afterward.

  Her bed was narrow, the light beside it a peach-colored frosted ballerina. “I could pick you up at the station and you could spend the weekend.”

  In the dim light, her freckles disappeared, or blended together completely. Her breasts were large and white, and he held one lightly in his hand.

  “Yes,” she said. “We’ll go to see the Liberty Bell.”

  Jams laughed. He was beginning to lighten, to feel less blurred and more even again, like he was landing from a long way away. He didn’t want to be alone. He didn’t want to sit in that bar he’d imagined or buy those women drinks. He would go to Pennsylvania and work in the store and have Ursula come on weekends. She would tell him facts he’d never known. Tonight, in bed, she’d asked him if he knew the three state capitals with president’s names in
them. She would fill him with facts.

  “You know,” he said, sitting up, “I came here to return something to you.”

  “Return something?”

  He groped on the floor for his pants, reached into a pocket.

  “Here.”

  He dropped her lipstick, and the Certs, and the three pennies onto the bed.

  She examined the lipstick.

  “Cantaloupe,” she said. “That’s mine.”

  “I took them from your pocket the other night.”

  “You stole them.”

  He wanted to turn off the light. She was sitting up too, and the sheets had fallen from her, and he wanted to lose himself inside her again. He reached for the light, but she stopped him, climbed on top of him, and held his wrists. Her freckles made patterns on her chest.

  “But you brought them back,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “And we’ll go to see the Liberty Bell.”

  “Yes.”

  His mind was filling again with her whiteness.

  “Jackson, Mississippi,” she said. “Jefferson City, Missouri. Lincoln, Nebraska.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  MACKENZIE HAD IMAGINED THAT she and her mother would rush into each other’s arms when they finally met up. She would, she had thought, bury her head against Cal and say, “Let’s go home, Mom.” But instead they stood awkwardly, mother and daughter, in the Cafe Trieste, while around them people read newspapers, the pink section of the Chronicle scattered around like crepe paper at a party. The smell of coffee hung in the air, surrounded them.

  The night before, Jason had told her that he’d gone ahead and bought the co-op. Come back, he’d said. She had screamed at him, cried. “You are so selfish,” she’d said. “What about my family?” “What about us?” he was saying when she’d slammed the phone down.

  Cal smiled at her, tentatively. She indicated a wooden chair, always the perfect hostess.

  “I was having a café au lait,” Cal said. Her hair was too long, and was streaked with gray. She had it pulled back, fastened it with a fat barrette, like a schoolgirl would have done.

  Mackenzie ordered an espresso, but when it came she concentrated on shredding the lemon peel rather than drinking the coffee.

  Beside them, a gray-haired man wearing a lime-green beret held a woman’s hand. The woman wore a necklace made of shark’s teeth, and a long purple dress.

  “But I love you,” he said.

  “But I can’t stay,” she said.

  “But I love you.”

  “But I can’t stay.”

  Over and over.

  And then, out of somewhere deep within her, Mackenzie wailed, a low cry of unbearable sadness.

  “Mom,” she said, “why did Alexander die?”

  It wasn’t what she had thought to say. She had felt her mission was to bring her mother back home. But sitting here she felt no need greater than the need to hug her brother. And her arms ached from the emptiness. Mackenzie bent her head, rested it on the table, and sobbed.

  Cal, seeing her daughter there, felt the emptiness too. Her life, everything that had come before, was over. She had left it. She reached for her daughter, tried to bring her close despite the distance of the table between them, and was able only to clutch at Mackenzie’s arms.

  It was a long time before Mackenzie lifted her head. The tears made her eyes blaze turquoise, like the Caribbean.

  “I. Want. To. Go. Home.” Her voice was choppy from tears.

  Cal shook her head sadly.

  “We have to get on with our lives,” she said softly. Mackenzie thought, What have I done to get on with my own?

  Earlier that morning, Daisy had called her at the hotel. “Bring Sam back,” she’d said. “It’s time we got on with our lives.” Everyone was moving forward, Mackenzie thought, except for her. She was frozen in time with Alexander, who would never be able to get on with his life. “Remember that guy I told you about?” Daisy had said shyly. “We’re getting married. Put Sam on. Let me tell him.” Sam had listened, frowning, his foot swaying, back and forth, faster and faster.

  Mackenzie had wondered what they had told him about Alexander. That he was visiting the angels? Or sleeping in heaven? Those were the things she had heard as a child.

  “Sam,” Mackenzie had said when Daisy hung up. “Do you understand that your daddy can’t come back?”

  The little boy had shaken his head, slowly. And his mouth had moved as if words were there, ready to spill out at any time.

  Cal still held Mackenzie’s arms, tight.

  “I want you to understand something,” she was saying.

  “No.”

  “I’m staying here, Mackenzie. I drove around all these months, running from myself. I have to stop. I have to face things. So do you.’”

  “What about Dad?”

  “We’ve talked. He understands. I’m not saying any of this is easy, Mackenzie.”

  She looked at her mother.

  “Mom,” she said, “what about me?”

  Cal dropped her arms.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Mackenzie walked through the unfamiliar streets to pick up Sam at Iris’s. She walked, crying, stopping to get her bearings, then quickly losing them again.

  Remember our special Porter dinners? she had said to her mother. Remember our Christmas trees? Remember us? Her mother had said, “We all remember.” Or maybe she’d said “We’ll always remember.” Mackenzie wasn’t even sure which.

  She hugged herself against the wind. She was perched on top of a hill that dipped straight down. A VW kept rolling backwards, trying to make it up. The Golden Gate Bridge stretched, orange, across the bay, then disappeared into the fog.

  The VW rolled back again.

  What do you call a pregnant elephant on roller skates? Alexander had asked her. A Volkswagen! He’d taught her elephant jokes and how to play “Heart and Soul” on the piano and the French verse of the Beatles song “Michelle.”

  She closed her eyes and pictured herself with Alexander. They were children again, in the living room at home, watching the Ed Sullivan Show, The Z in Zenith across the bottom of the television was a jagged lightning bolt. The Beatles were on. Alexander had written out the French words on index cards so that they could sing along with John, Paul, George, and Ringo. His arm was draped around her shoulder.

  “My seester,” he whispered in a terrible French accent. “Je t’aime.”

  “Let’s have a big hand,” Ed Sullivan said, “for the Beatles.”

  No one else in the world had that memory but her.

  When Mackenzie opened her eyes, the fog was lifting slowly from the bridge, like a film in slow motion.

  The VW reached the top, chugging, then disappeared up the next hill, a small fat dot. She looked again across the bridge. The burnished hills of Sausalito and Tiberon were beginning to peek out.

  Things were happening that Sam didn’t understand.

  His grandmother was here, in San Francisco, somewhere between all these hills and the bridges and water and wet misty clouds. Aunt Mackenzie had told him that his grandmother had driven across the country all by herself. The United States stretched across his mind, big and bumpy. He thought of the cactus he’d seen on that postcard, the way the branches looked like arms, waving good-bye.

  “While you’re with Iris,” Mackenzie had told him, “I’m going to get Grandma Cal and she’s going to come home with us. Home to Rhode Island.”

  But the way his aunt had said it made Sam think it wasn’t really true. It hadn’t even sounded like she believed it, and Sam had thought of Rhode Island, the way it looked on maps his father used to show him, just a tiny speck with Providence floating in the Atlantic. He could hardly imagine his grandmother in San Francisco. She belonged, instead, by the big window in the front room of her house, gazing out. Her eyes, he thought, sometimes seemed like they were looking very far away, at something very distant.

  He didn’t understa
nd why his Aunt Mackenzie had yelled at Jason last night. Or why she’d slammed the phone down hard, then sat and listened to it ring without picking it up, even though she had to know it was him calling back. Sam had counted ten rings before it stopped. At home, he and his mother sat and waited for the phone to ring, and if it finally did, Daisy practically pounced on it. Usually, though, they just sat and waited. Sometimes, Daisy would call the telephone company and tell them to check for trouble on the line. She would never, never just let it ring like Mackenzie had. Besides, Sam thought she liked Jason. They had held hands while they walked down that street full of Indian restaurants, the street that smelled like a foreign country must smell. He thought they were in love and would get married, that Mackenzie would wear a long white gown, like Brandy’s Barbie doll, with tiny ballerina slippers and a veil that floated like clouds around her. But now she was mad at Jason and Sam wasn’t so sure they would get married after all.

  And then, this morning, his mother had called and told him that she was getting married to a man named Willie.

  “Sam,” she’d said, “I was too excited to wait for you to get home before I told you. You’re going to love Willie. He paints great big pictures. He can help you with your drawings. And he can play lots of songs on the guitar.” Then she’d added, “He’s got a big beard.” Like that would make it all right.

  “So what?” Sam had screamed in his mind. “What if Daddy comes back and you are married to a man named Willie?” He’d scrunched his eyes shut, pretended he was in a seashell, on a beach. Then he’d tried to imagine his father’s face. Lately, his father’s face had started to grow fuzzy, no matter how hard he tried to remember it exactly. Just like he mixed up his father’s stories with the ones in books, he had started to mix up his father’s face with the way he looked in pictures. After he’d hung up the telephone this morning, he’d only been able to think of his father the way he looked on Aunt Hope’s mantel—in uniform, swinging a bat, in a Little League game.

  Then, just when Sam was thinking that even the memory of his father was disappearing, Mackenzie had said, “Sam, do you understand that your daddy can’t ever come back?”