The Year She Disappeared

by Ann Harleman

  She’s right. I have. I do.

  Alex went on. “The detective said no cell phones, that’s the first thing he’d check. Get rid of yours, don’t even take it with you, so you won’t be tempted. Don’t call me, not even from a pay phone. Incoming calls can be traced. Don’t tell me where you’re going—that way I can’t tell anybody else. Don’t use your real name, or Jane’s. Don’t use your bank card, charge cards, checkbook, anything like that. Pay for everything in cash. Okay?”

  Nan was silent, feeling her life as she’d known it up till now tug at its moorings. Feeling herself come adrift.

  “Okay? Mama—are you with me so far?”

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “Why wouldn’t Gabe go to the police?”

  “He won’t.”

  “But … she’s his daughter.”

  “He just won’t. There’re things he wouldn’t want them looking into, things that might affect his license.”

  She’s got something on both of us, then.

  “He’ll do it through the courts, where his reputation’ll protect him from any awkward questions. We can’t let that happen. Because he really might win. Who’s going to believe that such a fine, distinguished citizen is a child molester?”

  Who, indeed? Nan thought.

  “Where were we? Okay. Pay for everything in cash, that way you can’t be traced. Can you get hold of enough cash, between now and Wednesday?”

  “I—I think so. How much? I mean, how long would I need it for?”

  “I’m getting to that.” Alex’s finger tapped the Time Line. “Here’s where you and Jane lie low till I get temporary custody. Then—somewhere in here—I get a place ready for us, Jane and me. Then you bring her to me, or I come and get her. Four to six weeks should do it.”

  Nan struggled to clear her mind, to match her daughter logic for logic. “But how will I know when you’re ready? I can’t phone you, and you won’t know where to phone me.”

  “From what the detective said, our motto should be ‘Back to the fifties.’ We’ll use the Personals, in the paper. Nobody reads newspapers anymore. What we’ll do is, twice a month I’ll put a message in the P.I. A progress report.”

  “How …” Nan began faintly.

  “On the seventh and the twenty-first of each month. All you have to do is get hold of the P.I. and read through the Personals. We can’t use real names, though. The message will say “To Pookie,” and it’ll be signed “From Hippie.”

  Nan felt her lips curve in a smile, despite the grave substance of this conversation. “Hippie” and “Pookie” were the names three-year-old Alex had bestowed on herself and Nan, her own versions of names from a German children’s book they’d had in Bonn. Nan would have thought Alex had long ago forgotten those names. The sound of them made her feel oddly shy. She looked out over the terrace, half expecting to see the sun break through the mountainous mass of clouds.

  “You’ll do it, then? Mama?”

  When Nan turned back to her daughter, Alex’s face was calm. Like Tod, she’d always been comforted by organizing and planning. And now, as so many times in the past with Tod, that comfort deepened and widened and extended itself to Nan. The beauty and calm (now that the neighbor’s leaf blower was silenced) and settledness of the old house seemed to enfold her, to surround and soften the terrible thing her daughter had revealed.

  She leaned forward to say No, to say, Maybe we should wait —the tip of her tongue already curling to meet the roof of her mouth—when suddenly Alex stiffened. Her head turned toward the foyer. Nan heard the sound of a car door closing, then the large heavy front door of the house opening, then Jane’s voice shouting, “Nana, Nana, Nana!”

  Gabriel stood in the archway with Jane perched on his shoulders, her chin at a queenly angle, her small hands clutching his curly silver hair. Together they were so tall that Gabriel had to stoop so that Jane’s head would clear the carved molding above them. He winced as Jane, already struggling to get down, caught him in the ribs with one bright-red rubber boot.

  She ran to Nan, clambered onto her lap, nuzzled her in an almost animal way, lamb to her ewe. Whispered into her ear, “A runcible cat!” to which Nan whispered back, “With crimson whiskers!”—their special greeting, a secret guarded with giggles and sidelong glances. Nan relaxed beneath the warmth and weight of Jane. She laid her cheek against Jane’s thick horsetail hair, damp with rain.

  “An unexpected pleasure,” Gabriel said to Nan. Then, to Alex, “Don’t you have yoga class till noon on Mondays?”

  “It was canceled,” Alex said. (Lied, Nan thought, checking her watch: only ten thirty, yet she seemed to have been here a lifetime.)

  The openness was gone from Alex’s face. She looked—smoothing her hair, running a finger inside her sweatshirt collar—no more surprised than an early homecoming would merit. Maybe Nan shouldn’t have wondered at this—Alex had always had the ability to hide her feelings. But still. How could the unspeakable thing they’d just been speaking of disappear so completely? The Time Line had vanished; Nan heard a faint crackle as Alex crossed her legs.

  “You’re home early,” Alex said.

  “That maxillofacial was canceled. Remember, the little girl whose mother—” He broke off, with a glance at Jane. “Skin graft didn’t take.” Bending down, he picked up Nan’s spilled cup and saucer and teabag and set them on the table. Then he leaned close to brush Nan’s cheek with his. She smelled, beneath the familiar fragrance of Obsession, post-surgery disinfectant soap mingled with the faint tang of blood. Gabriel looked at the bottle of Calvados and the brandy snifter, both of which had mysteriously migrated to Nan’s side of the coffee table. “Tough morning?” he said to Nan.

  Quick as thought, she reached around Jane and lifted the glass and drank. “Irregular verbs,” she said. Gabriel, in that way he had of knowing all about you, knew about her literacy tutoring and her Spanish class. The brandy burned in her throat, down her esophagus, into her stomach, laying a trail of light as it went. Gabriel watched her with an amused expression. His eyes—greenish silver, the clouded color of Coke bottles just out of the refrigerator, oddly lighter than his olive skin—reminded Nan, as always, of one-way mirrors. She was seen, but she could not see in.

  Jane slid off Nan’s lap and went to Alex. “Look, Mama! I’m a turtle.” She turned around to show off her new backpack, a turtle’s shell. Then she shrugged free of its straps and unzipped it and began to show Alex the drawings she’d done at preschool.

  “We decided to play hooky, didn’t we, Janey?” Gabriel said. “It’s a shame to be indoors on such a nice day.”

  Nice day? Nan looked out at the gray, misty morning. Did Gabriel suspect something? Was that why he’d come home early? Or was this— Nan went cold all over—a way he’d found to be alone with Jane?

  Children open you.

  Gabriel went into the dining room and stood by the long rosewood table opening his mail. Like Alex, he now seemed completely normal. This made Nan feel the distance between husband and wife: two people who barely looked at each other, the smoothness of whose interaction came from never quite engaging. She recognized it from her years in the Foreign Service—the gingerly demeanor of couples who found themselves repeatedly stranded together in alien territory.

  “Nana!” Jane knelt down in front of Nan and flung her arms around Nan’s knees. “Come upstairs and see my guinea pigs. We got them on Saturday. They don’t even know you yet!”

  |

  The sky had darkened to gunmetal, the mist turned into fine, almost imperceptible rain. Nan, crunching across the gravel to her car, inhaling the blessedly fresh, damp air, ducking under the low-hanging cedar and feeling its wet-feather branches brush her cheek and neck, thought, I don’t know what to do.

  |

  The summer Jane turned three, Gabriel and Alex had bought a cottage on the Olympic Peninsula near Port Angeles, where Nan (it goes without saying, Gabriel nevertheless said) was welcome anytime. After lunch on a July day singing
with heat, she was nearly asleep under the limbs of a huge old madrona on the bluff overlooking the Dungeness River. The Peninsula Gazette (29 NATIONS AGREE TO BRIBERY PLAN) was spread across her face to keep off flies.

  Soft summer voices. Nan removed the newspaper, looked down to the river. Gabriel and Alex came into view, Gabriel carrying Jane slung over one shoulder and whistling a song Nan didn’t quite remember the words to. (Singing, he couldn’t carry a tune, but he could whistle anything.) Alex shook out a blanket the color of marigolds and they settled on the riverbank.

  Nan was no more than fifteen yards away, but above them, where they didn’t think to look, and hidden by the shadow of the madrona. Honorably she put on her glasses and returned to the newspaper. BRIBERY BAN, she saw with disappointment. She gave up and watched the three of them. It was a perfect midsummer day. Puffy white clouds, doubled in the shining river; the liquid calls of cardinals; the fragrance of sun-warmed strawberries in the field behind Nan. The sun printed two shadows on the yellow blanket: one for Alex, one for Gabriel/Jane. They sat like that for a while. Then Alex got up and walked down to the river’s edge and stood with her back turned, looking out over the water.

  In Gabriel’s lap Jane stirred, stretched. The radiance of sleep gilded her bare arms and legs, and her hair clung damply to her perfect skull. Gabriel’s hands moved over her, his palm smoothing her forehead, his fingers tucking the light brown hair behind her ear. Even at this distance, Nan could feel his tenderness. Jane arched her back. One round coppery-rose arm was flung out; a hand clenched a fistful of yellow blanket. Her eyes opened, and she seemed to look straight up at Nan. Gabriel stroked Jane’s leg. Cicadas sang in the long grass where Nan lay. Gabriel’s hand cupped Jane’s knee. The sound of the cicadas soared and fell. At last Jane’s eyes closed, and she fell asleep again, and finally Nan did too.

  When she woke, the light had changed, the sun was veiled in thin clouds, and the riverbank below was empty. There was only a square of bruised grass where the blanket had rested. A loon skimmed the surface of the water. Nan’s back hurt from rocks hidden in the grass under the madrona, and her neck was stiff, and she was sweaty. She remembered a small waterfall, a quarter mile or so downriver. She climbed down and walked along the riverbank, taking her time, concentrating on her footing.

  The waterfall was steeper than she’d remembered. A stream fell straight down over rocks into the river with a homing sound, water into water. Ten yards or so away from it, Nan stopped. It was like listening to the organ in a great cathedral. She sat down on a fallen log and rubbed her palms over the thick, woolly moss and waited for the sound to fill her brain. To wash away the lingering, uncomfortable strangeness of the afternoon. Instead, the words of the song Gabriel had been whistling surfaced in her mind.

  Be careful—it’s my heart

  It’s not my watch you’re holding,

  It’s my heart

  Between the log where Nan sat and the waterfall, the riverbank rose steeply, then leveled out into a wide granite shelf that disappeared behind the curtain of falling water. Climbing slowly over rocks and crumbling shale, grasping fistful after fistful of sumac and cedar, she edged onto the shelf. Inches away now, the roar of falling water filled her head; the pounding of it entered her body. She hesitated. Cold spray needled her face, her bare arms: a small, inviting pain. She took a deep breath, then ducked behind the curtain of water.

  Peace. Not silence, then, but sound? For a long time she stood there in the gloom, pressed against the rocks in her thin, wet summer dress, and let the sound wrap around her, fill her, wear away whatever it was she’d seen back there on the bluff. A touch; a look. The heat, she told herself. The light off the river. Dreams of a drowsy summer afternoon.

  |

  I don’t know what to do, Nan continued to think, all that long Monday afternoon. And all that evening, smoking forbidden cigarettes and drinking forbidden brandy and pacing through the three rooms of her apartment in West Seattle. It could all be Alex’s own unhappiness coloring perfectly innocent events; it could even be Alex’s jealousy of Gabriel’s love for Jane.

  I don’t know what to do.

  But of course she did know. And this time, unlike that July day on the river bluff, what she did would not be nothing.

  On Monday night Nan barely slept. On Tuesday morning she sat sleep-deprived over a breakfast of black coffee and cigarettes in the chair that had been Tod’s—something she’d trained herself to do, a gesture of acceptance, preferable to sitting across the table from his ghost. The window of the kitchenette was open to the little garden. Birds were beginning their sunrise call-and-response, and the white trunks of birches emerged against the green wall of spruce and hemlock. Inside these three gracious, spacious rooms—the apartment found for a distraught Nan, a Nan nearly undone by her husband’s long, slow death, by Gabriel—was the life she had, finally, made for herself. Her calm and beautiful refuge.

  How can I give this up? How can Alex ask me to?

  But in fact (Be honest!), it was already gone. Destroyed—blasted to ruins—by what Alex had told her, in the same way that, long ago, Nan’s innocent seven-year-old’s world had been shattered by the newspaper photographs of the concentration camps that she’d found in a hatbox on a high closet shelf, the year after the war ended. Her grandmother, Dorothea, never knew what made little Nan turn suddenly grave. A delayed reaction to her mother’s death three years before? The onset of what the Church chose to call the Age of Reason? All Dorothea ever knew was that some essential innocence had departed.

  Innocence: a strange word to use for the state of not knowing, Nan reflected as she watched the smoke from her cigarette spiral upward. A word (the nuns had pointed out long ago) that originally meant “doing no harm.” The chain was all too clear: Nan to Alex to Jane, the loss of innocence handed down like some evil legacy. Though Nan would have liked to escape this thought, she found she could not. How much, she wondered unwillingly, did Alex remember of their year in Genoa? Of that one terrible revelatory day?

  Naptime. Muted sounds from across the hall. Waking in the heavy afternoon light, the taste of sleep sour in her mouth, to see four-year-old Alex standing silently on the threshold. Her thumb was in her mouth, and a shabby square of blue blanket trailed from her fist. Where’s the bambinaia? was Nan’s first thought. Why isn’t she looking after her? Then she felt Jack standing by the side of the bed, frozen in the act of lifting up the covers. He was naked. The blood banged so loud in her ears that she had to turn away. When she looked again, Alex was gone, her footsteps clattering away down the loggia to the sun-filled balcony, where she fell two stories onto the rose-colored paving stones below.

  Afterward, nursed devotedly, guiltily, by Nan, Alex never spoke of the afternoon that led up to her broken leg, only of the fall itself. But from that day, she changed. She formed attachments, but only mild ones, easily relinquished. There was always a part of herself that she kept back, for the time when the other person would fail her and she would be once again on her own. The tilt of her head said that it was wise to keep an own to be on. Nan’s guilt was great—she’d been the cause, however indirectly, of physical harm to her daughter, and probably of psychological harm as well. She never knew how Alex interpreted what she’d seen in her mother’s bedroom, or even whether she remembered it, because she was afraid to ask. Yet, despite her guilt, Nan did not stop having affairs. She just made sure to hide them better. Wasn’t this what made Alex see her childhood as (Nan knew) she saw it now? The Family as constructed by Nan, arranged like an old-fashioned photograph with everyone in place, frozen in a crazy attempt to look natural, smile, pause, explosion of powder and flash.

  Nan got up and poured herself another cup of coffee, then sat down again at the little table. She turned the pack of Marlboros over and over between her fingers. Forbidden coffee; forbidden cigarettes; forbidden anxiety and stress. She felt the way she used to during the years in the Foreign Service, before each of their many downward moves. That V
erge Feeling, she used to call it. Now, as then, it was all to do over again, the acclimating to a new reality—but requiring an adjustment far greater. Requiring the acceptance of a secret, ugly reality inside the one you’ve always known. Useless admonitions from the once-memorized State Department publication Handbook on Orientation for Wives and Dependents (unaffectionately known to its readership as HOWDY) floated to the front of her mind. Do not deal with the black market. Do not take pictures from planes or trains or bridges. Do not wear shorts or bathing suits on the street.

  Alex’s Time Line, which Nan had found tucked into her coat pocket when she got home the day before, lay on the table in front of her. She should get up now, right now, and begin. So much to do if she and Jane were to leave the next morning. Money; pack; stop the newspaper and ask her upstairs neighbor to collect the mail; let Mariela know she’d need to request another tutor. (Abusador!—Mariela’s word for her ex-husband—echoed suddenly in Nan’s head.) There was no one else in Seattle to inform. No friends close enough to miss her. (Tod’s long dying, begun almost as soon as they’d retired to Seattle, had left little time for forming new friendships, and then after that there’d been Jane.) No lover. (The man she thought of as the Last Lover had decamped two years earlier.) She should get up right now and go to the phone and call Deenie, let her know that she and Jane were coming to Providence.

  Instead, she lit a cigarette from the stub of the old one, the way she and Deenie used to do, two high school girls coughing and giggling in the tall grass behind the gymnasium, nearly fifty years ago. She sat with her elbows on the scrubbed wooden table and smoked and looked out the window. In the center of the little garden was a twisted apple tree silvered over with lichen. Green moss and tiny, tight-curled ferns filled the cracks in the paving stones around it. That was the beauty of the Northwest, as Tod had so often pointed out: green all year round. The smell of wet leaves and bark and alderwood smoke from her upstairs neighbor’s chimney rode the chill, damp breeze into the kitchenette. In Providence, where she and Jane were going, there would be snow. White roads and black, bare trees and the city smells of cinders and car exhaust. It would be weeks before she sat like this again in this verdant, peace-filled place that Gabriel had found for her.