Vanishing and Other Stories

by Deborah Willis

  “I’m not sure if I should tell you this.” April leans over the varnished arm of her chair. She gulps wine. “I found out where she lives. I saw her hitchhiking last week in Fulford and I followed, saw where she got dropped off.”

  I raise my eyebrows, and April takes this as a pat on the head (“What’s that you got there, girl? An address? Good girl”), gains confidence, grabs my hand, and pulls me from my chair. My sketchbook falls and I trip down the deck’s three steps.

  “What if she’s home? What if she sees us on her lawn? What if she calls the police?” I pull on April’s sleeve as she drags me around her bungalow, toward her matte yellow Tercel. I feel pressure in my chest—the same as when, at thirteen, I stole a sweater from Woolco (lilac, acrylic)—and then we’re in the car. “April, this is a bad idea.”

  “Have some fun, p’tite.” She backs out of her crooked park job and we swerve onto Vesuvius Bay Road. April was once married to a police officer, and since the divorce papers were filed she drives too fast, drinks too much. We speed along the narrow asphalt past a scattering of houses and the evening glitter of St. Mary Lake.

  “I have a good feeling about this,” she says. In the back, a bottle of her wine rolls and thuds against our seats.

  Within minutes, April and I are at the other end of the island, south, twisting around Reynolds Road. Then she takes a sharp right up a gravel driveway. The yellow Tercel bounces on rough rock. Broom and the arms of pine trees scrape against the car. The driveway seems to twist for miles, and after each corner, when I think we must be close, it’s more dusk and trees and gravel. Nerves and drink warm my cheeks as we get nearer to you, your house, and I reach around for the wine bottle, fish the corkscrew from April’s glove compartment. A corkscrew: I marvel at her foresight.

  We find your place, surprising considering the geography. The island: winding, crumbling roads and mile-long driveways that lead to houses layered in moss. Peter and I are staying in such a house, folded into such moss. We’ve tucked ourselves away for the summer, like in a bed. Or rather, Peter tucked us in, covered us with leaves like blankets, old man’s beard, the falling ash of arbutus, under the guise of getting away from it all.

  “This is what we’ve always wanted! Our dream!” Peter said last winter, exclamation points at the ends of all his sentences. For weeks he’d talked about islands and had taken out glossy books on the West Coast from the library. We were standing at our apartment window, eating salami and hot mustard sandwiches, watching snow spit over Toronto high-rises. Peter’s hand was on my back, under my grey wool sweater. This was after his first infidelity, a period of desperate, clinging affection between us. I tried to remember if I’d ever given the impression that this—an island that can be driven end to end in half an hour—was my dream. “You’ll find new subjects! You’ll like it! You’ll see.” He spoke as though he was thinking of me, not for me. But we are here for Peter: Peter who needs a place to think, Peter who has a book to write.

  “This whole thing makes me nervous,” I say to April, a last-ditch attempt at responsibility, sobriety. The cork pops. Beyond the pine and fir and cedar, there’s finally an open clearing, short, uneven grass spotted with tiny yellow flowers.

  We’re still hidden by the earth-green shadows of trees that line the driveway. Fifteen feet away is the field you must call your yard, inside that a small fenced-in garden, then the barn-like house, painted a burnt ochre. A blanched wood fence surrounds the field, its boards fallen in most spots. More traces: laundry floating on the line (green drawstring pants, thin white T-shirt), strawberries in the yard, a deck painted Naples Yellow. Behind the garden, the house leans to one side, somehow orange and off-centre, like a rotting and caving pumpkin. The windows have pale blue trim (peeling), the door is white: paint jobs of different qualities, likely reflecting different tenants. Faded plaid curtains float in the windows.

  “She shares this place with four others. A commune or something,” April says. The car is still running, old and shaky.

  “A commune. Of course.” We have reason to believe you are about twenty-four, twenty-five. I climb out of the car and take a few steps forward, careful to stay in the cool shadow of forest.

  April rolls down the window. “I didn’t mean for you to get out, honey, just for us to have a look.”

  The wine bottle is in my hand.

  “What are you going to do, Mimi? Hike around the property?”

  I ignore her, take an elegant sip from the bottle, and walk toward the yard. All I can think is: This is where Peter comes to see you. He has parked his car on the flattened grass, walked in without knocking, looked out from those windows. One of those windows is yours. One of those rooms has a bed, a lamp, a bookshelf, whatever else you keep. In the garden I notice a boy, twenty at the oldest, and stop walking. He hasn’t seen me, but I’m close enough to watch him pop green beans off their stalks and lay them in a flat basket. He wears a beat-up leather cowboy hat and takes bites from some of the beans, throws others over his shoulder. I can’t distinguish much of his features except for dark hair that falls over his eyes in a wavy, undecided way. His arms are muscular but too long and his jeans don’t fit right along his legs: too tight at the ankles but nearly slipping off his hip bones.

  “She could be here. Behind those curtains.” April is beside me, her chin on my shoulder. She left the car running, her door open. “That’s probably her roommate. Get back in the car. I shouldn’t have brought you here.”

  The boy finishes picking, then leaves the garden through a wire gate and heads toward the house. Even from this distance, I hear the clump of his boots on the hollow porch, the creak of the screen door as he passes inside.

  “Hello? Mimi?” April whispers. “I’m agreeing with you. This was a bad idea.”

  “I want to see her.” I hand April the bottle. For the first time, I feel as though I can picture you: the green pants on the line would fit a woman with narrow hips, though the shirt proves broader shoulders, likely freckled with sun. And I picture your hair the same rust shade as the house, imagine you pedalling down your driveway on the old bicycle that rests against the porch. Your hair flies behind you in a tangle of auburn. Is that how Peter first saw you, on your bicycle? Muscular calves, bare feet. I can picture it.

  Then I feel fur rub my sandalled foot: a small white cat scratches at my toes, and I bend to pet its head. He rubs his wet nose into my outstretched hand. “Hey? Hey, who are you?” These days I feel a tipsy affection for anyone who touches me, no matter how accidental. “Look at you, mister. Look at you.”

  April presses the lukewarm wine bottle to my shoulder and passes it to me. “Apparently she’s a cat person.”

  When I look up, I notice an entire litter. They idle under trees, sleek across the fence, pounce half hidden through grass. Some are white like the one who now obsessively licks the hairs of my arm, but there are a couple of golden tabbies, some greys. Feral, but friendly enough. As they walk, the movement of their bones shows under their coats. Eyes depthless and crystal, amber or sap green.

  “Give me a minute.” I scoop up the small white cat and walk to the chicken-wired garden. Your garden is nothing like April’s. Hers is cluttered with bursts of showy, non-indigenous colour: irises, rhododendrons. Her orchids have won prizes. Your garden is muted greens: peas, beans, herbs, unripe tomatoes, a corner of strawberry plants that shoot out slim legs. I’ve never had a garden, though Peter and I do keep and name potted plants. Next to these neat rows I feel off balance, useless. I turn back to April and throw the wine bottle behind me, over the deer-proof fence and into the garden. An arc of Shiraz sputters through the air. “Okay. Fuck it. Let’s go.”

  AS I SAID BEFORE, you are not the first. There was that Heather girl: Irish, an exchange student. Peter came home from work one evening and cried into my lap until my black pants were soaked through. He repeated over and over the banal words the girl spoke. She had said, “I admire you,” then unbuttoned her coarse blue sweater in his office.
I stroked his back and made him tell me everything: how she wore her hair, what she smelled like, the angle of her cheekbones, the shape of her chin and nose. It was how I forgave him.

  Months later, I met her at a faculty and grad student party. I shook her hand. She was a quiet girl, with a thick body and still eyes. I’ve tried to imagine how it felt to be her, the girl, or to be you for that matter, the “other woman.” Of course, as Peter would point out, you can only be defined in relation to “the woman.” Without me, you disappear.

  I MET APRIL the day after Peter and I unpacked our suitcases. She was to be our neighbour. Her acre is next to the stout brown house Peter had arranged to rent for four months, a place where we can get some quiet, he called it. He hadn’t bargained on the shaky bleats of April’s goats, her chickens’ chatter, or the lowing of her Jersey, Marilyn. April arrived on our doorstep with a plastic bucket of brown and blue eggs and a zucchini as long as my forearm, though not as skinny. She never goes anywhere without gifts. We have a fridge full of her eggs, their shells like pastel chalk.

  I was opening and closing cupboards in the kitchen, to see what plates and pots we’d been provided with, while Peter flipped through the island’s weekly fifteen-page newspaper. He read the best headlines aloud to me from our screened deck. “‘Garage Sale Draws 200.’” He smoked a cigarette, an occasional habit we both refuse to give up. “Two hundred. Just imagine that.”

  “Gracious.”

  Then April, in neon pink flip-flops, slapped her way up our porch steps and stood in front of the screen door. “Hello! Welcome wagon!”

  I came out of the kitchen in leggings, one of Peter’s collared shirts, bare feet. Peter stared at her but didn’t move to the door, didn’t say a word.

  “Have you been to Vesuvius Beach yet?” April held up her hand, her stretched and faded bathing suit hooked on her thumb. Purple and white flowers. “Warmest on the island!” She pushed open our screen door, stepped onto the deck, and handed me the eggs. She wore a white dress of eyelet lace and a sheer magenta shawl. She is the kind of big woman who believes she can wear anything, and so, miraculously, she can.

  I said, “These eggs are blue,” and ten minutes later I was seated on the duct-taped upholstery of her car (which we would later name Lemon). As we left Peter behind in the brown house, I remembered to introduce myself: “I’m Mimi. Who are you?”

  Now she arrives nearly every morning with cappuccinos she makes herself, and some afternoons we paint together, it doesn’t matter what: Fulford’s streets, the view from Mount Erskine, or Marilyn, who stands dull and quiet for hours behind April’s violet bungalow. For me, a studio painter, this is not the kind of work I do. But for April, art is a social, drunken, unserious business. She goes to the mainland to buy red-sable brushes, scrubs them lovingly with walnut oil, but hardly knows how to use them. When she can scrape together the money, she buys primed canvas like paper, wastes it on first attempts.

  April and I spent that first afternoon at Vesuvius Beach. It was May, not warm enough to swim, but we did anyway. She brought a six-pack of frothy, malty beer I’d never heard of, and we plotted to seduce the young sons of tourists once July came. April manages to have a sex life, though we don’t discuss it much. And she doesn’t know, for example, that Peter and I only make love in the middle of the night, when the room is dark. I wake to his fingers sliding down my arms, then the sex is hard. We grip each other like strangers, hot breath on our faces. Then we fall asleep, my cheek pressed to his wet, bony chest. By morning he’s gone, reading the paper or already in the kitchen with April, drinking a cappuccino.

  After our trip to Vesuvius Beach, I came home to Peter, who was still on the deck. I rushed up the steps. “We’re having dinner at April’s.”

  “So you like it here.” Peter had moved on from the newspaper and the Bible was open on his lap.

  “The Bible?”

  “Research.” He uses either too many or two few words. There is no in-between.

  “April’s that woman I went swimming with. She suggested dinner at her place, since we haven’t unpacked yet.” I tried to hide that I felt giddy, being the first to make a new acquaintance.

  “April? She sounded Québécoise. I wouldn’t be surprised if she changed her name from the French.”

  “She expects us by six. We don’t have to knock.”

  APRIL COULD HANDLE PETER, his initial silences and then, later in the evening, his lectures, his educated anecdotes. She fed us pasta with seared scallops in a dill sauce (dill from the garden, of course) and poured wine into preposterously huge and heavy glasses that she had hand-painted. She told us never to buy blackberries, since she had more than she could eat in a year. Though we didn’t know the names she mentioned, she fed us island gossip (apparently, everybody fucks everybody else) and Peter, like any academic, was enraptured by her tales of scandal. April pointed to the clumsy realism on her walls and explained that, though her income came from selling bread at Jana’s Bakery and the Saturday market, her real love was painting.

  “Painting anything. Walls, houses, canvas, wood. I’m just colourful.” She laughed too loudly, and shook her long, grey-streaked hair. Her eyes folded shut in a blissful, childish way, wrinkling her temples.

  “I can tell,” said Peter, not altogether kindly.

  April wore a loose olive tank top that showed her body of contradictions: soft but tanned shoulders, hard, knotted knuckles, and red fingertips. At fifty-three, she is thirteen years older than me but seems younger, bustling. Peter was right: she came from a small town in Quebec, but left at sixteen.

  “Mais je peux encore faire une tourtière fantastique—la recette de ma mère.” She had a harsh accent that clashed with Peter’s Parisian French, one of three languages he knows inside out.

  She buzzed about exhibiting her work at a hole-in-the-wall gallery in Fulford, how ferry tourists loved her Island Houses. I told her about Toronto: the agents, grants, shows, reviews. Peter complimented the wine.

  “So you’re a linguist,” April said as we ate tiny dark chocolates from a glass bowl. “If it’s not too boring, doctor, tell me about your work.”

  “It is too boring,” he answered, sternly but in good humour, though he rarely spares me from discussion of his latest class, chapter, lecture, or the thoughts that cram themselves into his days. He was, I assume, bored by her.

  “Do you sell these?” he asked, and held up his wineglass. “We would love to have a set.”

  WHEN WE RETURNED (overfull) to our small house of unfamiliar smells and furniture, Peter didn’t go to the narrow room that would serve as his office. We went to the bedroom and I flicked on the dim bedside lamp.

  “I had fun,” I said, though I meant it as a question. I wondered if he had enjoyed himself.

  “Yes,” Peter answered, and sat on the other side of the double bed, a bed much smaller than our own queen-sized. “She has character, I suppose.”

  I kicked off my sandals and began to unbutton my shirt. “And she’s a marvellous cook. Sometimes I wish I could cook—though not often.” I was chattering. For the first time in years, in this strange room, his eyes on me felt new. In Toronto, we rarely went to bed at the same hour. Before sleep, I was used to seeing the light of his study shine through the crack in the door.

  “You’re burnt.” Peter touched his finger to my shoulder and I felt a pulse of pain.

  “We were at the beach all day.” I went to the suitcases we’d left open in the living room and fished for moisturizing cream, tossing clothes and books on the floor. I checked my reflection in the bathroom mirror: my neck and shoulders were splotched red, the skin already puckered white in places.

  When I returned to the room, Peter sat me on the bed and slipped the bra strap from my shoulder. “This might sting.” He pressed the cool cream onto my skin, gliding his hands along the angles of my back. “I looked over some of my notes today. I outlined the second chapter.”

  We have discussed that his new book will be a r
eturn to his doctoral thesis, but employing more subtle thought, more mature theory. Perhaps, he will argue, naming is not simply a process of organizing the world, of owning the world, or of knowing the world—but of sundering oneself from it. Perhaps, I had said, though I always felt the opposite.

  His face was so close I could smell April’s wine on his breath. I touched his knee. “Maybe this was a good idea, coming here,” I said, and my skin peeled into his hands.

  I SCOOP UP THE WHITE CAT and climb back into April’s car.

  “You’re stealing a cat?” April, in her too-dramatic way, sounds shocked, horrified.

  “Let’s see how the hussy feels when she’s the victim.” My words are slightly slurred and I’m using April’s vocabulary. The cat jumps from seat to seat in the car, smelling the torn upholstery, Kleenex box, crumpled clothes. He is young enough to be totally trusting, the same as I imagine you to be. I rub behind his ears, and his eyes seal shut in a euphoric feline smile. “A husband for a cat. It’s a good deal.”

  April doesn’t bother to turn around. She throws the car into reverse and speeds backwards down the long narrow driveway. Her wine has worn off and the adventure is over. We drive back in silence, her car being too old for even a functioning tape deck. When we reach our gravel street, she drops me at the mailboxes.

  “So I took a cat. Do you really think that’s wrong?”

  “Do you love him?”

  “The cat?”

  “The husband.”

  I take April’s hand. She has told me of her relationships, her brief marriage, and often asks these types of questions, fascinated by the idea of commitment, of prolonged sharing. She points out words that Peter and I pronounce in the same odd way, the sayings we employ, our constant use of “we” even when we are most distant from each other.