The Year She Disappeared

by Ann Harleman

  “Sweetie—what is it?”

  “I can’t talk now.” Alex’s voice shrank to a whisper. “Can you come over?”

  “Now?” It’s 5:06 in the morning, Nan carefully did not say. Alex sounded tremulous—a rare departure from her usual clipped, self-reliant calm. Or was it just the effect of whispering?

  “This morning. After they’re gone. Around nine?”

  “I’ve got Spanish class. Then Mariela.” After Tod died, Nan had volunteered for the West Seattle Literacy Project, on the advice—the nagging, really—of her grief counselor. It was supposed to be a short-term thing, quick-fix therapy; instead, almost against her will, she had become so attached to her first tutees that now, five years later, not only was she still tutoring, but she’d started learning Spanish to try and meet her pupils on their home ground. “I could get there by eleven.”

  “Mama, please. I need you.”

  “Okay. I’ll be there a little after nine. I’ll cancel—” A click; then silence. “Alex?” Nan said into the dead phone. “Sweetie?”

  |

  The beautiful old house—Gabriel and Alex’s house—clung to the south slope of Queen Anne Hill, three stories of precisely cut reddish stone with a wide slate terrace overlooking the city. A territorial view, Seattleites called it: perfect, Nan thought when she first heard about the house, for Gabriel, who was nothing if not territorial. She parked on the crescent-shaped gravel drive under the sheltering branches of an ancient blue cedar, wondering how Alex—practical, sensible, methodical Alex (like so many women, Nan seemed to have given birth to her opposite)—could possibly need her. Rolling down the window, she breathed chill morning air, the smells of pine and cedar. A damp breeze touched her cheek. Be calm, she told herself. Be interested, but don’t engulf. But her heart quickened, and her breath came short. Was this, finally, the moment? All these years—three decades since that afternoon in Genoa, when Alex was four—all these years of yearning after her daughter and never being able to reach her—

  Nan got out and went slowly up the front steps. To her left the terrace beckoned. Beyond distant city buildings, held off by a fence of tall iron palings like beasts at the zoo, she could just make out a wedge of Elliott Bay, dark blue in the blue-gray morning mist. From somewhere high up came the terse cries of a crow. Before she could lift the knocker, the door opened.

  Alex’s abundant coarse brown hair (Tod’s hair) was lank and dirty-looking and pulled carelessly back into a ponytail that strayed around her ears—the same stubborn curls that had resisted Nan’s hairbrush when Alex was little. Her eyes (Tod’s eyes) had dark smudges of sleeplessness under them. She stood aside for Nan to enter, and as she passed, the unwashed smell of her daughter’s body assailed her.

  Something is very wrong.

  Nan heard herself sigh. Her grandmother, Dorothea, had raised her on the principle that a child is a sort of bank account, kept by the adult only until the child is old enough (eighteen, in Dorothea’s view) to manage it herself. Then you hand it over. Despite—or because of?—Alex’s deep self-reliance, Nan had not found this principle easy to follow. Children open you: that had been Nan’s experience. Once you have a child, anyone has the high road in to you. All they have to do is wonder aloud what’s best for your child.

  Alex led the way to the living room, and they sat down on opposite ends of the long, voluptuous white leather sofa that always made Nan think of marshmallows. On the coffee table were a bottle of Calvados and two brandy glasses, like fragile balloons on stems. Alex waved a hand at them. “Something to drink?”

  “At nine thirty in the morning?”

  “Suit yourself.” She leaned forward and poured a generous amount of the golden liquid into her glass, lifted it, and drank. Her throat above the grimy sweatshirt looked white and vulnerable. Calvados was Gabriel’s drink; Alex drank only the occasional glass of wine.

  On one side of them a wall of glass looked out onto the terrace. The dense green of rhododendron and laurel gleamed at its edges, and there were cypress and juniper and (even now, in December) some sort of flowering shrub in pots and tubs. On the other side, the living room gave onto a small conservatory, where more plants of every size could be glimpsed through the mullioned glass doors, pressing against them like a crowd of curious onlookers. So much green; so much gleam. Nan quelled an impulse to shade her eyes.

  “I could make coffee if you want,” Alex said. “Or tea?”

  Nan shook her head, then, on second thought, said, “Tea would be good. Herbal tea, if you’ve got it?”

  Alex rose, still holding her brandy. Nan saw that her hand trembled, and the goblet rang on the coffee table, glass against glass, when she set it down. She went out through the dining room into the kitchen. Her step—tentative, wavering—bore no resemblance to her usual purposeful stride.

  Gazing after her in dismay, Nan thought of all the dinner parties at the long, shining rosewood table, where she’d found herself seated among mildly illustrious fellow guests. The grateful parents of Gabe’s patients (the King County prosecutor, a state senator, a local software millionaire); the board members of his various charities; his medical colleagues. Nan (if she’d been asked) would have preferred a family dinner in the kitchen to such worshipful gatherings among drifts of snowy table linen and candlelight and flowering vines in pots climbing the pale green walls. French cuisine and Cuban cigars and Calvados. The orchestration of sensation, in their home, in their garden, at these dinner parties—such elegance had to be Gabriel. It was uncharacteristic of Alex, though she was the one who prepared the blanquette de veau, who tended the small conservatory full of the difficult and rare: orchids, Siberian irises, pomegranates. And Alex herself? Marriage transformed her. Her heavy nut-brown hair, released from its pre-Gabriel rubber band, flowed gleaming to her shoulders, and her mouth was shiny red, and she wore, instead of her pre-Gabriel beige or navy suits, an emerald-green or sapphire silk shift. It was as if Gabriel had sprung her.

  What had they talked about at those dinners? Nothing trivial—not with Gabe. Nan ate pumpkin mousse or persimmon sorbet or crepes Directoire and listened to Gabriel talk about his patients. The five-year-old boy blinded in a street bombing who that day had had his bandages removed. There was this poster on the wall, Gabe said, a girl eating an ice cream cone. Julio asked for helado. Couldn’t understand why that would make his mother cry.

  From the first time she’d met Gabe, one thing had been clear to Nan: he loved the uncertain. With new patients, he was utterly intent—learning them, not only their physical deformities but their hopes and dreams. Then, once he’d done what he could for them—often, according to Nan’s fellow dinner guests, performing miracles—they passed completely from his thoughts. Nan would sometimes ask about a patient whose story, passionately detailed a few weeks before by Gabriel, had stirred her. The response was a look of utter blankness. Julio? What Julio? By the time Jane was born, not quite a year after their wedding, Gabriel had stopped learning Alex. She could not be either pitiful or imperious enough to hold him. She was his—her calm and her self-possession and her beauty—a possession permanently secured, like the orchids and the shining dinner table and the lovely old house. And Gabriel became, despite what might have been predicted of a man who’d delayed marriage till his forties, a good father. Very good; visibly good. (Babies, Nan thought at the time, require endless wooing; they’re never quite yours.) Alex, at Gabriel’s request, had quit work shortly before Jane was born. (She’d been an internal auditor for a large HMO—a job Nan couldn’t even begin to imagine.) At the center of her life now were only the baby and Gabe. Fatally, she tried harder to please him. Nan had watched it all in candlelight over a long series of dinners, guiltily enjoying the attention she received from Gabriel’s guests and saying nothing. Alex had always been aware of her mother’s attraction to her husband. Anything Nan might have said, any advice she might have given, would have been suspect.

  Alex handed Nan her tea, in a delicate porcelain cup that
rattled softly in its saucer. Then she sat down on the other end of the marshmallow sofa (Gabriel’s taste in furniture inclined toward the baronial) and picked up her brandy snifter and held it in both hands. She was pale, Nan saw, even paler than usual, and somehow hunched. Not her shoulders, or her body—it was more as if her spirit were hunched. “Mama,” she said. The word had the intonation she used to use as a child, the one that heralded a question that the adults in her life would most likely be disinclined to answer—generally one involving the two great themes of death and sex. A melody Nan would long since have forgotten, except that she heard it, these days, from Jane.

  She raised her eyebrows invitingly, but Alex was gazing down into her brandy, so she said, “What, Sweetpea?”—the old endearment popping out.

  Still not meeting Nan’s eyes, Alex took a shuddering breath. Then she said, in a rush, “I want you to take Jane away from here.”

  “What?”

  “Just go away, as far as you can, as soon as you can. Just the two of you.”

  “Alex! Why? What’s the matter?”

  “Jane needs— She needs—” Alex took a long drink of brandy, then set her glass on the coffee table. She rubbed her forehead with two fingers.

  “It’s a new thing for her, preschool,” Nan offered. “You go through stages in a new place. First you’re looking in, from the outside. Then you’re sort of a minor character. And then, one day, all of a sudden, you’re on the inside” She hesitated, then plunged. “Remember when you started school? In Genoa—”

  “Mother, please. Italy was light-years ago. I was—what?—five years old.”

  “Four.”

  “Jane is the child now. I’m talking about Jane. About— Jane’s in danger, Mother. Your granddaughter is in danger, and you’re not even listening. As usual.”

  Demoted from Mama to Mother, Nan said meekly, “Tell me.”

  “Jane is being abused.” Alex’s eyes found Nan’s and held them, her level gaze heart-stoppingly like Tod’s. “Sexually,” she said.

  A bomb dropped inside Nan. She took a deep breath. Licorice-scented steam from her untouched tea met her nostrils and steadied her.

  “Alex—are you sure?” She shouldn’t have said that—a good mother would have believed her daughter instantly, unquestioningly. Still, Nan thought, now that I have said it … “How do you know?”

  “She’s … different.”

  “How?”

  Beyond the long windows a neighbor’s leaf blower started up, fracturing the stillness, startling in its ordinariness.

  “She has bad dreams. She never used to. Scream dreams, she calls them. And at preschool, she’s different. Her teacher says she stays in the doll corner all morning, or out by the rabbit hutch. She doesn’t play with the other kids.”

  “Maybe—”

  “No!” Alex said. The amber liquid jumped in her glass. “She does things with them. The dolls. She—she strips them naked and ties them up, ties them to the backs of the rabbits.”

  Nan would have given anything for a cigarette. But there was no smoking in this house—a doctor’s house, a house with a young child in it. Outside the room’s long windows the sound of the leaf blower approached, receded, approached again.

  “I don’t understand,” she said, momentarily forgetting everything that Tod, a diplomat to the core, had taught her. (“No one wants advice,” he used to say. “No one wants solutions.”) “Why don’t you just take her out of there, if you think the staff might be abusing her? But, Alex, those stories in the news—Sometimes it turns out that the children are making it up, not making it up exactly, but, you know, saying what they think the grown-ups want them to say—”

  “It’s not the preschool.”

  “Then who—”

  “Why are you always so willing to believe people are good?” Alex burst out. “Why do you always just shut your eyes?” She rolled the globe of her brandy glass back and forth between her palms, looking down into it as if it held some message. “It’s Gabe,” she said, so softly that Nan wasn’t sure she’d heard. The jackboot noise of the leaf blower grew louder, closing in. Alex looked up to meet Nan’s horrified gaze. “It’s Gabe,” she repeated, shouting now. Her cheeks were rosy, her eyes unnaturally bright. “Gabe! Gabe!”

  The leaf blower stuttered, then stopped. In the silence, Alex reached out a shaking hand for the bottle of Calvados, uncapped it, poured. Nan’s field of vision darkened and drew in, blackness smoldering around its edges, until all she could see was the stream of golden liquid falling into the frail bubble of glass. She seemed to see this from a great height, as if she were standing on a ledge looking down. Her heart thudded against her stapled breastbone. Automatically, one hand went to her skirt pocket. Her fingers closed around the plastic vial of nitroglycerin.

  Breathe! she told herself. One … two. Breathe. Three, four … five.

  She unscrewed the cap and fumbled out a pill and put it in her mouth. She took a too big swallow of tea, scalding hot, burned her tongue.

  Alex didn’t notice. She was leaning forward, gripping her brandy glass, and her hands shook so hard that bright drops leapt out onto her white shirt. “The way he touches her, Mama. The way he looks at her.” She looked away, out through the French doors to the terrace. Her face tightened with pain. “Last night when I came home, he was—he’d been putting her to bed, and he was coming out of her room, and he—his bathrobe was untied—”

  Nan’s hands came up in an involuntary motion of dismissal. The cup and saucer on her knees slid forward and fell onto the Persian carpet, splashing the coffee table’s carved wooden base and Nan’s pant legs with tea. “It can’t be,” she said. “He wouldn’t.”

  But a memory came to her from the summer before, of walking past the bathroom door in the morning sunshine. Of Jane sitting cross-legged on the linoleum floor next to the clothes hamper, holding a pair of Gabriel’s white cotton boxer shorts across her lap. Leaning back against the pedestal of the sink and wiggling her thumb through the fly. It’ll grow, she was crooning. It’ll grow.

  Alex slumped back against the white leather cushions. She looked unspeakably tired. Nan put out a hand and touched her arm. Seconds ticked by.

  “Can it wait a little?” Nan said. “Can’t you just … watch her? Make sure she’s— Make sure it’s what you think it is?”

  “I have waited. I’ve been watching her for weeks now. Don’t you see? Somehow I—” Her voice shook. “Somehow I let this happen. I can’t let it go on.”

  “What about taking her to see somebody—a counselor? Have her … evaluated.” Even as she said it, the ugliness of the word evaluated, the coldness of applying it to Jane, made Nan ashamed. She looked away. Outside the long windows the sky had lowered, and clouds plump with rain were moving in from the west.

  “A therapist would have to file a report with child welfare. That would mean letting Gabe know.” Alex didn’t have to say more. Nan knew perfectly well that Gabe would fight such an accusation—true or false, it didn’t matter—with all the means he could muster. And with his reputation, his connections, those means were considerable.

  “And Jane. They’d question her, Mama. Right now maybe she doesn’t know, really know, that what’s happening to her is bad. But when the therapists—and the courts, Mama, because that’s what it’d come to— when they got done with her, she’d know. She’d never be able to forget.” Alex paused and looked straight at Nan, her face stripped of everything but need. “Her innocence would be taken away forever.”

  The way mine was, that day in Genoa. Was that what Alex meant? If so, she did not have to say it. Her white face, her eyes puffy from a night’s worth of tears but still keeping their steady Tod-like gaze, said it for her. It’s not the same thing at all, Nan wanted to say (but you couldn’t refute an accusation that hadn’t been made). You can’t guilt-trip me into giving you what you want (but the guilt was, arguably, all in Nan’s own mind).

  Anyway, Alex was right. Nan’s doubts didn’t
matter. It didn’t even matter whether Gabe really was abusing Jane. True or false, she’d be questioned. Interrogated. Hounded.

  Children open you.

  “What do you want me to do?” Nan said.

  Of course Alex, being Alex, had a plan. She left the room, her step quicker and lighter, and Nan could hear her moving around overhead. She returned with a manila envelope. Inside was a smaller envelope stuffed with fifty-dollar bills (“You’ve got money, right, Mama? This is all I have, I had to save up so Gabe wouldn’t notice”), Jane’s passport, and a stiff, folded sheet of children’s drawing paper.

  So she knew I’d say yes.

  Alex sat down close to Nan and unfolded the piece of paper. On it was a heavy dark vertical line studded with notches in red or green, each linked to little balloons filled with matching red or green writing. “I made a Time Line. Here’s where we are now. On Wednesday, that’s two days from now, you say you’re taking Jane to see the Nutcracker —there’s a matinee that day. You leave town instead. Right away.” Alex’s finger moved back and forth between the line with its notches and the little balloons. Her fingernails, Nan noticed, were bitten to the quick. Nan couldn’t read the writing inside the balloons without her glasses, so Alex read it for her. “Here—four days from now, that should give you time to get away, to hide her—I move out. And here—the day after that—I file for temporary custody of Jane. That way Gabe can’t go to the police.”

  “The police?” Nan said in alarm.

  “With a custody order, I’ll have possessory rights. That means I can leave Jane in the care of whoever I want. So they can’t charge you with kidnapping.”

  “Kidnapping?”

  “He’ll have to hire a private detective instead. So I talked to one. He told me what he’d do in a case like this, how he’d go about looking for you. I made a list of what not to do. Here—”

  “Wait!” Nan said. “I didn’t realize—”

  “Mother. This is serious. We’re not playing around here.” That look again. The expression she’d adopted at the age of four, the expression that said, You’ve lost the right to question me. The one that said, You owe me.