After that, he stopped going into bars. He just drove around for a while, hoping an idea would come to him, some sense of what might have happened, where she might have gone. But nothing came.
He drove through the downtown, didn’t see her. He went into the McDonald’s closest to their home, showed the photo around, a little more of it torn off now so no part of any adult she had been with was visible. She hadn’t been in there either.
He drove past the bus station, then on impulse parked, went in. There were a few transients sleeping in the chairs, trying to escape the cold. She hadn’t had a coat, he realized—her coat had formed part of the circle around her bed. If she were outside, she’d be very cold by now.
Besides the transients, a few other people nervously waited for a bus out of town, or waited on someone coming in. He checked the men’s bathroom and had a woman coming out of the women’s go back in and check there. He walked up and down the station, showed her photo to the clerk behind the glass. No luck.
He was finished, about to leave and continue his aimless driving, when he saw the payphone on the wall. He checked for change in his pockets and when he found he had enough, started toward it. At the last moment, he swerved away, went and sat on a chair.
It’s a mistake to call, he told himself.
Yes, of course, but what else is there to do? I can’t find her in the house, I can’t find her in town, I can’t go to the police. What am I supposed to do? Just wait until she shows up again?
But it’s impossible that she is gone. I have the only key to the door and I still have it. No sign of forced entry. She should still be there.
You think if you go back, she’ll have suddenly appeared again?
He shrugged. No, he didn’t think that. The problem was, he didn’t know what to think.
In the end, having no other options, he called. The phone rang three times, and when she did not answer, he hung up before the answering machine could pick up. The payphone spit out his quarters. He slotted them back in and dialed again.
This time she answered even before the first ring had finished sounding. “Hello?” she said, breathless, her voice high.
He didn’t say anything. For a long moment he simply listened.
“Hello?” she said again, and now he heard the suspicion beginning to cloud her voice.
“It’s me,” he offered. “Drago.”
For a long moment there was silence. He thought she might have hung up. “You’ve got some fucking nerve,” she said.
“Look,” he said.
“Give her back!” she said. “Bring her home right now.”
“You don’t have her?” he asked.
“What?” she said, startled.
“Dani,” he said. “You didn’t take her?”
She started to say something, then stopped. She started again, then released a high, keening wail. “What kind of sick game are you playing with me now? What have you done with my daughter?”
“I haven’t done anything with her,” he said. She didn’t say anything. He stayed listening for a long time. “Margaret?” he finally said. “I’m not toying with you. I can’t find her. I can’t find Dani. Do you have any idea where she could be?”
“You bastard,” she hissed. “I’ve recorded this and had the call traced. If anything’s happened to—”
Quickly, he hung up. So, she didn’t have Dani. At least there was that. As for the call, let her trace it. It wouldn’t tell her much: only the city where he lived. And how was she even to know he had called from a city he actually lived in? No, he was still safe.
But what about Dani? Was Dani safe?
It had not been his fault, he told himself. Sometimes things just happen and you can’t do anything about them. Just as with the scar on Dani’s temple—that had not been, when you considered it logically, his fault. It had simply been bad luck. He could see that even if his ex-wife never would. If she had been able to listen to his point of view, really listen, take a clearer view of things, then they would never have split up. If they’d never split up, she would never have gotten the judge to agree to him only having monitored visitation. He would not have had to make the choice he had made, one day, during one of those visitations. The state-appointed monitor was texting on her phone while he tried to have a meaningful connection with his daughter in the eating room of a children’s museum—not even a café, since no food was for sale, simply a room where you could eat your own food if you happened to have remembered to bring food, which he fucking hadn’t. How was he to know there was no café? Dani was hungry and crying and the state-appointed monitor was apologizing but saying she couldn’t allow them to go somewhere else to get food, because the agreement meant that Dani had to stay there. Of course Drago could go get food, and probably should, the monitor said, but Dani would have to remain with her. And, she emphasized, it would come out of his visitation time. If his wife had listened to his point of view, he would never have—after taking Dani to what she called the potty, instead of returning to the court-appointed monitor—walked right past her holding Dani in his arms as she, the monitor, continued to text. Even then, his only plan had been to take Dani across the street for a bite to eat. Easier to get forgiveness than ask permission and all that. But before he knew it, he had Dani in the back seat—he didn’t have a car seat, true enough, his bad, so he made a cushion for her with his jacket and that was enough—and was driving, stopping only long enough to take all the money out of his bank account before leaving town with his daughter forever. But if you kept in mind all the steps, thought very carefully about what had led to what, it was hard not to conclude, as Drago had concluded, that it was not his fault the way everything had all happened, but the fault of his ex-wife.
He hadn’t thought about all that in a while. The last six months had been about not thinking about that. They had been about establishing a meaningful relationship with his daughter. At first, Dani had been resistant, had kept asking for her mother. But once he told her that her mother was dead and that all she had left in the world was him, she had started to get over it. They had lived in the car for a few days, a week maybe, then he’d found a house to rent in the rougher part of a city, somewhere they could live until their money ran out. First thing he’d done was put in dead bolts. He kept both keys around his neck—not to keep Dani a prisoner so much as just to keep her safe. Then he’d nailed the windows shut, driving the nails in at an angle so that they couldn’t be picked out easily. It had only taken her one punitive trip down to the basement to understand and accept that she wasn’t allowed to leave the house—he was proud she was such a quick learner: she was more like him than her mother in that way.
After a year, he figured, everything would be O.K. After a year, Dani would love and trust him and he could take a job and enroll her in school. Maybe they would even reach a point where he could start calling himself Drago Borozan again, not Tom fucking Smith. And maybe by that time Dani’s mother would have accepted how much she had had a role in everything that had gone wrong and they could have a serious talk and both of them could work out a new custody arrangement that would give them equal parenting time with their little girl.
They could have gotten there if Dani hadn’t vanished. With Dani gone, though, he couldn’t see a way back to that other life.
He was exhausted when he finally got home. It was quite late, almost midnight. He searched the house once again. She still wasn’t there. When he looked out the window of his room, he could see the emaciated woman from next door at her own window, watching him. He closed the blinds.
What had that woman said? She had seen someone who might have been him, but had never seen his daughter? Strange. It was almost as if she didn’t believe he’d ever had his daughter there with him.
He opened a can of soup, heated it, drank it down. It made him feel warm, comfortable, which in turn made him feel guilty. He sat on the couch for a little bit. Eventually he climbed the stairs and went to bed.
He w
as lying there, half-awake, almost drifting off, when he heard it again. The off-key stifled singing coming through the wall. Once he heard it, he realized he’d been hearing it for some time.
He left the bed and crept to the wall, pressing his ear against it. Yes, there was something, a singing, and it sounded like his daughter’s voice, like Dani’s voice. There were words, he thought, although he couldn’t make them out. He wasn’t, come to think of it, absolutely sure they were words, and yet there were pauses and shifts that felt like a language of sorts.
He pulled his head away from the wall. Slowly, he moved toward the door. He opened it as quietly as possible, wincing as it creaked. Maybe she would be there, he told himself; maybe she would be waiting for him. Maybe everything would go back to normal: back to just her and him.
But by the time he threw open the door to her room the sound had stopped. He turned on the light. The room looked exactly as he had left it: the bed pulled a little way away from the wall, the circle of objects around it. His daughter was nowhere to be seen.
What does it mean to be me? he wondered, later that night. He was not in his own bed but his daughter’s. After not finding her, he hadn’t been able to bring himself to leave the room. He had carefully broken the circle, moving aside his daughter’s coat, her teddy bear, and then stepped inside and closed the circle again. The bed was too small for him, and his feet hung off the end. He lay there, trying to feel some sign of his daughter’s presence. All he could feel was his own ungainly self.
What does it mean to be me? He had lived, it seemed to him, several lives, and when he strung them together they didn’t seem to make any kind of chain. Whatever continuity was supposed to be there seemed to have dissolved and he didn’t know how to get it back. Even in just the last two years, there had been a life where he and his wife had been together and had been happy, followed by a life where he had been alone and miserable, followed by a life with just him and his daughter, followed by this life now, the one that was now beginning. What did it all add up to? Nothing. Merely four separate existences. He wasn’t the same person in any of them. Or rather, in the first three he was three different people. For this life, the newest one, it was still too early to say what, if anything, he was.
At some point, he was not sure when, he fell asleep. He dreamed that he awoke in the same room, with everything exactly the same as it really was. He was in his daughter’s bed, still groggy, and he could see there, on the other side of the makeshift circle, his daughter, standing still, attentive, watching him. When he got out of bed and moved toward her, he found he could not cross the border of the circle. As if I’m a demon, he thought. He prowled along inside the circle, edging around the bed, looking for a way out. But there was no way out.
For a long time his daughter watched him. He tried to speak to her but no sound came out. As for her, she did not speak at all. She just watched him, as if expecting something, and when she didn’t get whatever it was she wanted she turned and walked out of the room.
He could no longer see her, although he could still hear her. He heard her descend the stairs. He followed her footsteps down, one after another, until, from one footstep to the next, the sound ceased.
And then he heard the crash of the door breaking in, shouting, saw a great flash, smoke. Men were yelling and screaming at him to put his hands up and not move and waving guns in his face and he was being forced to his knees and out of the circle, which, somehow, now he could cross.
Many things happened after that, all of them too quickly for his taste. Two detectives took him to a small room and questioned him, asked him where his daughter was, what he had done with her. All he could say was he didn’t know. He didn’t know. Yes, he had taken her, abducted her if they wanted to insist on that term, but then she had disappeared, he didn’t know where she was. Had he killed her? Of course not, he loved his daughter, loved her dearly: he could never have killed her. How could they think such a thing?
“You abducted your daughter a few months after striking her hard enough to fracture her skull and leave her with a scar. How could we think anything else?”
The light was too bright. He couldn’t see who had said this exactly—one of the detectives no doubt, although the voice didn’t sound like either of their voices. He tried to explain that even though, yes, he’d lost her, she had suddenly reappeared again, only moments before they’d arrived. That he had woken up and seen her, and then she had left the room. And then they’d rushed in. How was it possible they hadn’t seen her on their way in?
A trial of sorts, a conviction. He muddled through from one day to the next. His ex-wife came to see him in jail and sat on one side of a plexiglass wall, and they spoke to one another through telephone receivers.
“Where is she?” was the first thing his ex-wife said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “You have to believe me.”
“Please,” his ex-wife said, “please. For my sake. Even if you killed her, Drago, tell me. I need to know.”
But he simply shook his head helplessly. Soon she was telling him she was glad he was in jail, that he was a horrible person. His arrest, she taunted, had been his own doing. Didn’t he know they no longer needed time to trace a phone call? That as soon as he’d called from the payphone they’d known where he was? And was he an idiot, not knowing that the bus station lot had cameras? They had his license plate right away, even knew what direction he’d left in. Even then, it would have taken a few days for them to comb the streets before they spotted his car. But a neighbor of his had called, an elderly woman, and reported that her neighbor was acting strange, claiming he had lost his daughter when there’d never been a daughter so far as she could tell in the first place. Two officers went to investigate and there was his car. Fifteen minutes later, the SWAT team was there. How could he have been so careless?
“Because I was looking for my daughter,” he said evenly. “That was all I cared about.”
“Just tell me,” she said, her voice rising. “Tell me what you did with her!” And soon she was screaming and clawing at the plexiglass, and they were dragging her away.
And then he woke up. He was fully awake this time, and knew that he was, that this time it was real. There was no daughter in the room: there was nobody in the house but him. But which him was it?
He got out of bed and approached the edge of the circle. At his feet a pair of small socks, a postcard, a salvaged doll missing an arm. Still remembering his dream, he expected it to be difficult to cross the barrier. It was like crossing over nothing. If he was a demon, he must be a very powerful one. Before he knew it, he was on the other side. Other than that, nothing had changed. He was still alone, no daughter.
He went back to his own room. It was morning, early still. He put on the T-shirt and jeans he’d been wearing the day before, then sat on the edge of his bed and laced up his shoes. He wasn’t sure what to do with himself, where to look next.
Downstairs, he started heating water for coffee. While he stood at the stove, he caught movement out the window.
Two police officers were at the neighbor’s house. She was out on the porch in her bathrobe despite the cold, her oxygen tank beside her, glaring into the morning sun. Breath was coming out of her in clouds. He imagined the chirping of her cannula.
She pointed at his house. The policemen turned to look too.
He backed away from the window, still observing them best he could. Slowly they made their way over. He moved from window to window, following their progress. They were walking casually, as if what they were doing was no big deal. They passed his car and were almost to the front door when one grabbed the arm of the other and pulled him back. They both stared at the car, the license plate, talking. One spoke into his radio, quietly. After a moment, the low crackle of a reply. Then they both were moving, more determined now, back to their police car. They got in and waited.
The water was boiling. He turned off the stove, poured the water into the cup, spooned some in
stant coffee into it, stirred. The jangle of the spoon against the cup was like faraway music. If he stirred exactly right, he could imagine he was catching just the hint of his daughter singing softly, at some distance away.
He would stir the coffee a little, take a sip, maybe two. Soon, he knew, things would come to a head. Another three minutes, maybe four. He would still have time to decide if, when they broke down the door, he would do as they instructed and raise his hands in the air and get down on the ground or if he would ignore his dream and do exactly the opposite, reach as if for a weapon and let them kill him. Did he even want to live in a world like this, one that was always threatening to come unraveled around him?
Either way, he knew he would never see his daughter again. He would never know what had become of her or what, if anything, he’d had to do with it. He took a sip of coffee. If you looked at it right, he tried to tell himself then, even if he had killed his daughter, it was hard to see that it was his fault. After all, how could it be his fault if he couldn’t even remember? Was he, now, even the same person? Probably even a lie detector would declare him innocent.
He took another sip of coffee and moved closer to the front door. He was ready. He thrust one hand deep into his pocket. Sing them in, Dani, he thought. Darling daughter, let them come.
The Second Door
1.
After a while—we had by then lost track of not only the day but also what month exactly it was—I realized that my sister had begun to speak in a language I could not understand. I cannot mark a moment when this change occurred. There must have been a period when she’d spoken it, or some mélange of English and this new tongue, and I, somehow, didn’t notice, responding instead to her gestures or to what I thought she must have been saying. But then something, some sound, a clatter of metal falling, caught my attention and I looked for the tin or the pan that had been dropped and realized the sound was proceeding from her mouth.
Was it me? I wondered at first. Some slippage in my brain, some malfunction of my hearing apparatus? I shook my head to awaken my mind, scraped the inside of each earhole with my smallest fingers.
Song for the Unraveling of the World Page 4
