Vanishing and Other Stories

by Deborah Willis

  THERE IS ANOTHER ROUTINE, and she is ignorant of it. Each night, he waits for her. Sometimes she has to work an hour or two of overtime, and while she does, he sleeps in his car. This is the kind of man he is becoming, the kind who gambles away his earnings and who sleeps in his car. But it doesn’t matter, because he likes the sound of her shoes on the pavement, stepping around the puddles. It invariably wakes him up.

  He follows her home, squinting through the rain. He stays far behind her, and keeps his lights off. He doesn’t mean any harm. He only wants to watch her step out of her car, shut her door, toss the car keys into her purse. He wants to watch her unlock the door to her building and disappear inside. Then he likes to imagine her in the elevator, and inside her apartment. Washing the makeup off her face, climbing into a dark bed, sleeping well.

  He has trouble sleeping. When he arrives home, he is often up for an hour, sometimes two. He sits in the dark and watches the aquarium. The convict tang, with its silver body and black bars, skims the rock for food. And the nocturnal flamefish is always up. Its red body is easy to see even in the dark. It is a slow, methodical swimmer. Following its cautious movement is the only thing that eases Tom into sleep. He wakes most mornings on the couch, in front of the aquarium. His body jerks as though he’s emerging from a dream, the kind where he is continuously, endlessly sinking.

  THEY SIT OUTSIDE and listen to rain hit the Dumpster.

  “What do you do in your other life?” he asks. “When you’re not at work?”

  “I try to get some sleep. I clean when I have to. I cook.”

  He imagines she eats her meals the way he takes his: alone, in front of a flickering television. “I’m not much of a cook. It’s depressing to eat alone.”

  “My father used to run a restaurant in Grande Prairie, so I’m happy in the kitchen.”

  “Grande Prairie? I imagined somewhere more exotic.”

  “Trust me, Grande Prairie is exotic.” She laughs. “My parents wanted me to take over the restaurant and I wanted to be a famous magician. You can imagine how that went over.” She rolls him a cigarette of loose tobacco that gets stuck in his teeth—“How’s that for exotic?” she asks—and shuffles her cards.

  “Let’s start over,” he says. “Let’s get married.”

  “You’re just like my ex-husband. Out of nowhere, Paul would say something hilarious.”

  “What happened to this husband? Did he die?”

  “If only.”

  “At least tell me your name.”

  “I’ve never liked it. My parents heard it on TV and it sounded perfectly North American to them.”

  “It’s Lucy, isn’t it? They named you after Lucille Ball?”

  “There are ways you could find out.” She drops the end of her cigarette to the cement. “Ask any of my co-workers, for example.”

  “Let’s get out of here. I mean it. We could take your show on the road. I’d make a good assistant.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. You’re too morose.”

  “You said it seems like we’ve known each other for decades. I just want you to tell me your real name.”

  She smiles, closes her eyes, and massages her neck. Her body leans, slightly, in his direction. She is so close to him that he could reach out and touch her hair. She has forgotten herself for a second, forgotten her desire for distance and privacy. He could wait for this to pass—and it will, quickly. She’ll look at her watch and walk away. He knows this because he too knows solitude. He knows its pleasure and its power. He knows it is a home you can occupy, a place where you can watch your pains shimmer around you like a school of fish. It’s also a habit, and he knows how entrenched and addictive it becomes. She might hate him if he pulls her out of its dark waters. It would hurt at first. And maybe always.

  Still, he reaches out and takes her hand. She lets him hold it for a second, maybe two. Then she slips it from his and checks her watch. “Look at that.” She stands to leave. “Time’s up.”

  HE LEARNS TO RECOGNIZE the ones who play for money and the ones who play to find God. The first play to win, and they stop once they do. They pick up their chips and they walk out. The other kind of gambler, the kind he is becoming, sinks into the game and disappears. This gambler plays because he loves the rhythm and routine. He loves the moment—a breath—between winning and losing. To be made or broken within seconds. To live or die—the choice made each minute, by luck or some other careless god. He loves the risk, and cares little for the reward. He plays to lose.

  “WHY DO PEOPLE SEE MAGIC SHOWS?” He asks her this after she has torn a twenty-dollar bill in half and magically restored it. What he really wants to ask is this: Why do people touch each other? Why do they fall in love?

  “That’s easy,” says Miranda. “To escape.”

  His friends and colleagues would pronounce that word differently, and it’s not just the accent, so faint it must be left over from early childhood. Escape. Others would emphasize the word with a tone she doesn’t use. They would mean a certain kind of irresponsibility. His friends and colleagues would see his actions—gambling, associating with this woman—as irresponsible, dangerous. He’s noticed the concerned looks they give him at work. He’s noticed the way they avoid him, out of fear or sympathy.

  But his time with Miranda is as generous, as religious, as he’s ever felt. As she performs what he knows are false shuffles and crimped cards, he is himself, and he is not himself. He is her attentive audience, and he is Miranda the Conjuror. He is the pleasure she takes from her own competence and the joy she feels in revisiting her repertoire. He is the grace that lives in her hands. To let go, to disappear, to forget himself. To exist in another’s skin, and then—on the long, dark drive home—to return to himself, with another’s knowledge. To escape. It was the only way to live.

  HER VOICE AS SHE COUNTS OUT his chips. Her laugh, brittle from tobacco and the casino’s air. The way she smashes his watch to pieces then restores it to him as good as new. Her hands as they hold the watch in front of his face, a hypnotist’s hands. That’s what haunts him.

  He has heard of men who resign themselves to loneliness and begin to visit whores. He imagines that they often visit the same woman, perhaps every night. They grow fond of the routine. Then they grow fond of the woman.

  Inside the casino, Miranda treats him like nothing more than a customer. When he sits at her table, she doesn’t look him in the eye or use his name. When she drops cards in front of him, he can almost believe they are strangers. It reminds him of Kelly’s last weeks. He had to move her from her bed beside the window to the hospital. There, she was cordoned off from him by tubes and wires and painkillers that made her mind and speech fuzzy.

  Only once in those last days did she really look at him. She woke up and he leaned forward and took her hand. She focused on him for one or two seconds and said, “I miss the fish.”

  So even then, she could surprise him. She’d never liked the aquarium when she was healthy. She used to joke that she only liked the sea star because it matched the throw pillows. But she must have grown fond of it during her illness, when watching the fish was all she had the energy to do.

  And now, Tom stares at Miranda as though she were a fish in a tank, beautiful and trapped and not meant to be touched. He tries to stop, for his own sake as well as for hers. He tries, at least, to keep a discreet distance. He often sits at one of the slot machines and watches her, pressing and repressing the button, losing ten cents at a time.

  HE LETS THINGS FALL APART. The condo he shared with Kelly has become chaotic. Dishes pile up on top of the dishwasher, dust lines the electronics, the hardwood is never swept. When he needs to do a load of laundry, he drops clothes into the machine then forgets them. He finds them days later, damp and smelling of mildew.

  He smokes inside now, and doesn’t care if the smell gets into his clothes or the furniture or the bedsheets. He likes the craving for nicotine that pulses in the back of his neck—a sure sign that he is alive. He smokes
when he can’t sleep. He smokes in front of the aquarium, and if the fish and corals didn’t need fresh oxygen, he wouldn’t bother to open the window.

  The aquarium. For an entire week he doesn’t clean the sides of the tank and the glass becomes sticky with algae. There are other problems: The lights have not been switching on at their regular intervals and he needs to repair the timer. And he hasn’t replaced the water, so the salinity has gone up to 1.27.

  It is late Saturday night—no, early Sunday morning—when the goby dies. Tom is on his third cigarette when it turns softly, weightlessly, on its side. It is a dark fish with a blue stripe that begins above its eye and continues the length of its body. The second before, it had been eating from the sand bed. Now it floats—the word leisurely comes to mind—toward the surface. Its eyes and mouth are open, and its face looks no different than it did in life. It drifts upward, and as it passes another goby, the live one tries to sink tiny, translucent teeth into its flesh.

  When it reaches the surface, it bobs there until Tom scoops it out with his bare hand. He should have put the rubber glove on; not to do so is a risky manoeuvre that could contaminate the tank. He has never before behaved so rashly. But he wants to touch the aquarium’s water and feel the fish’s cool skin against his own.

  THAT NIGHT, he goes to the casino with flowers: two white orchids that have been dyed blue. She refuses them. She refuses even to look at him. He stands beside her, under flashing lights and surrounded by the slots’ din, with the orchids in his hands. “They’re just flowers, Miranda. Take them. They’ll be dead in a week anyway.”

  When security arrives, she says, “I don’t know this person. He keeps calling me by some other name.”

  A man who has a phone piece clipped to the side of his head grips Tom’s arm and says, “Come on, friend.”

  So this is the kind of man Tom has become: the kind who is broke, frequents casinos, falls for cold women, and gets dragged to a parking lot by a man who calls him friend.

  The guard speaks into Tom’s ear. “What’s your name?”

  “Paul.”

  “Listen, Paul, I’m going to remember your face.”

  Tom shakes his arm loose from the guy’s grip. He drops the flowers on the pavement and walks off into the rain. Is this how she felt in her last moments? This free? This frightened? This far from herself?

  HE WAITS IN HIS CAR for her shift to end. The night is cold, and after a couple of hours he has to cover himself with the emergency blanket he keeps in the trunk—a precaution he took when he believed in precautions. Finally, she walks out the casino’s door and to her car. Her purse looks heavy on her shoulder, and she moves slowly despite the rain. She must be tired. She has not noticed him. He can tell by her walk that she doesn’t believe she has an audience.

  She gets into her car and he turns on his own ignition. When she pulls out of the lot, he follows. He doesn’t keep his distance. He keeps his headlights on.

  She drives for less than five minutes before pulling over onto the highway’s shoulder. She cuts her engine, steps out of her car, and stands in the middle of the road. She watches him come toward her as though she doesn’t care whether he runs her down or not. He keeps his speed up. His headlights hit her face, but she doesn’t look away. Her age shows under those lights, and she looks nothing like a woman who once commanded a stage. He slows, then stops in front of her.

  He gets out of his car without turning off the lights or the engine. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

  “You didn’t. I’m old enough to know who I need to be scared of.”

  “I just want to talk to you.”

  “Are you a crazy person? Are you going to kill yourself and blame me for it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You’re probably going broke.” She crosses her arms. “That makes people behave badly.”

  “I just want to disappear. Can you do that?”

  “Don’t you ever sleep? Don’t you have a job?”

  “Please, Miranda.”

  “It’s not that simple. You need props and a rigged stage and dry ice for that kind of thing.”

  “I just want to know what it feels like.”

  “Go home.” She speaks as though she is used to men like him. “Go home to your wife or whoever buys you those nice clothes.”

  “My wife is dead.”

  “Okay.” She looks up at the sky then closes her eyes. “I don’t care. Do you understand? I don’t care, because it’s not my job to care.”

  “Because you’re the dealer and I’m the player?”

  “Good guess.”

  “Because you’re the performer and I’m the audience.”

  “Leave me alone, Tom.”

  “I wasn’t joking about the two of us running off together. I wasn’t joking about taking your show on the road.”

  “You want to lose it all?” She smiles the kind of smile she must once have used onstage, before juggling knives. “Some of us don’t have that luxury.”

  “We should escape. We should be brave. You should have seen how brave my wife was.”

  “I have rent to pay. I have an ex-husband who owes me over four thousand dollars—but maybe that’s nothing to you.”

  “This time we might be lucky.”

  “I have a son. Okay?” She runs her hands through her dark, wet hair. “And I have to be up in less than five hours to get him to school.”

  He hadn’t imagined a child, another life that filled her own. He looks at her exhausted face and sees, now, how poor his imagination had been.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “You should go home.” But she doesn’t move. He steps closer to her and she doesn’t walk away. “Just tell me one thing.”

  “It’s Mabel, all right? My name is Mabel.”

  “Really? It’s cute.”

  “It’s terrible.”

  “I can see why you don’t like it.”

  She smiles, and he touches the hair that sticks to her forehead. She lets him brush it out of her eyes. He wraps his arms around her shoulders and she allows this. She leans into him, for one second, maybe two.

  WHEN HE GETS HOME, he scrapes the algae off the glass. He distills and cools twenty gallons of water, and replenishes the tank. When he sprinkles food onto the water’s surface, the convict tang, damselfish, and flamefish swim up to it. Tom presses his palm to the glass and touches the place where, on the other side, the sea star has attached itself. Then he lies on the floor, on the spot where Kelly’s bed had been, as though he’s beside her. He watches the fish until he falls asleep, and he sleeps until the next afternoon.

  That’s when he finds the seven of hearts. It’s in his wallet, which had been empty before.

  t r a c e s

  ALL I KNOW OF YOU is in traces: the musky smell of lavender and molasses in the house, his rushed phone calls when he thinks I’m not listening, the look on his face. Maybe if we met, I could explain my situation. Explain my situation. As if situations can be folded into the neat boxes of words, as if the word situation can define this. Define this: you are fucking (fabulous word, perfectly shaped box!) my husband. And for four months, you have occupied my mind, a presence I can’t place.

  I’m not sure how I know of you so clearly. I sense you in the house, something foreign, spicy, and warm that permeates the hardwood floors, dark walls, leather furniture. And Peter is quiet, though not in the brooding way I’m used to. He is calm and distracted, as though some new, bright thing has caught his attention. The two of us are trying too hard to be ourselves. I shower, paint, take rambling walks; Peter comes home with cheese and bread from the market. His book proceeds. He doesn’t discuss it much, doesn’t wrestle with it, simply writes. But he no longer watches me paint, and I paint thoughtlessly now, without concern for building a series for a show, or for what galleries might term saleable. I don’t even use my oils, just dab recklessly with watercolour.

  TONIGHT, APRIL AND I sit on her cedar deck as we do most evenings, si
pping her homemade wine from Mason jars. We lounge in her deck chairs, our sketchbooks resting on our crossed legs, and face her backyard. With her Baroque Red and Indian Gold pastels, I draw the sun that drops below the horizon. April plays a chaotic colour game in her sketchbook, and smudges the waxy Terra Rosa, Vermilion, and Prussian Blue with her fingers. I flip my sheet of paper, pick up my black pen, and begin to sketch the broad outlines of her features. It has been months since I attempted a face, though they’re my favourite subjects. This book and many others are full of Peter: the dent of his cheeks, lines of his eyes, his slim jaw, the changes of his skin and expression recorded over twenty years. I capture April’s long nose in one stroke and say: “I want to paint her.” April knows I mean you.

  She’s the only one with enough balls to talk to me about you. She gathers information, a big friendly dog digging for bones, then runs back to me out of breath, excited, proud. But April knows only certain details. She once saw Peter with a young woman in the Roasting Company—we assume it was you—but she was unable to describe her to any satisfaction. Long red hair, but she couldn’t tell if it was thick or thin. A body that was not fat or skinny. A white sweater. April saw you from behind, she said, so she doesn’t know your smile, doesn’t know your eyes. I have a canvas that sits blank against my kitchen wall, waiting for you. It will be a dark piece, I’m sure, but I can’t even begin, because—surprisingly—I can’t picture you. I can’t see you whole, so I try something simpler (imagine: an ankle, a freckle) and can almost get you in focus. But the images scamper away like the rats that harvest our compost box. Like everyone else, I content myself with rumours.

  April stares at my sketch, her hazel eyes following my pen. I stop and flip the page. My hand has fallen back into its abstract college days, and she might be insulted by the harsh black lines.