The Year She Disappeared

by Ann Harleman

  Deenie, thought Nan, with longing.

  Instead of a closet there was an old-fashioned wardrobe in looming mahogany. Feeling unhappily like Miss Marple, Nan peered inside. But how would she know what garments were missing? On a table by the bed, an answering machine blinked. Nan pushed the PLAY button and Deenie’s greeting came on:

  Enough of all this fiddle-dee-dee—

  I’d like to know why you called me

  followed by Nan’s own voice announcing her imminent visit. Frail and wavering, an old lady’s voice. Her two messages were the only ones on the tape.

  On top of the wardrobe something caught her eye, a glint of metal. Was it her imagination, or did the square shape seem to beckon? Nan rose and dragged a small oval-backed chair from the corner and positioned it in front of the wardrobe. The seat was covered in the same slippery satin as the bedspread. Nan pulled off her shoes. She grabbed a corner of the wardrobe and knelt on the little chair, then, with her other hand on the wardrobe’s carved top, pulled herself to her feet. Slowly she straightened up. It was a metal box, like a small suitcase, with a metal handle and a lock—too big to manage with one hand. Grasping either side, Nan tried to lift it. Too heavy. Her heart made a tiny fish-dive in her chest. Impossible to climb down from the chair and hold on to the box at the same time. Let the box fall? No—throw it onto the bed. She began slowly, carefully, dragging the box toward her.

  “Who you are?”

  A man’s voice, deep, foreign. Nan’s heart dived again; a flash of heat ran through her. The heavy box leapt out of her grasp. She had just time to think, The nitro! before the chair beneath her vanished.

  Then, with the abruptness of dreams, she found herself sitting on the closed lid of a toilet in cold fluorescent light.

  “This, it shall pain. I am sorry.”

  On his knees before her, a dark-haired young man upended a green bottle onto a folded square of cloth, then softly, delicately, stroked her knee. “I am sorry, I am sorry,” he repeated as she winced. The tiny white-tiled bathroom filled with a smell like Clorox. Nan made the mistake of looking down at the dark-red glistening mouth of her wound. Blood, bright blood, crawled down her shin. She swayed and would have fallen sideways if the young man hadn’t stopped her with a quick hand between her shoulder blades.

  “Nyet!” he said. (So he was Russian, then.) “Do not look.” She did not have to tell him that the sight of blood made her faint. He passed a large hand lightly across her eyes to make them close.

  She felt again the sting of the disinfectant, then something cool and jellied, then a soft pad and the winding of tape around and behind her knee. The young man’s hands moved slowly and with care. He whistled under his breath.

  “Konyets! Now can look.”

  Nan opened her eyes. Her knee was covered by a neat square bandage, which the young man, sitting back on his haunches, regarded with satisfaction. Bright black eyes met hers. They both, at the same instant, became aware of the pink-mottled expanse of Nan’s legs, bare from underpants to ankle socks. The young man looked away and began rolling up the cotton gauze in its tissue paper, capping the bottle of disinfectant, laying a green stalk of aloe (so that was the soothing coolness she’d felt) on the edge of the sink. His large hands were stained blue and yellow and red. He kept his body apart from hers, not easy in the tiny space, his head with its black springy curls tactfully turned away. He washed his hands with a scuffed chunk of soap, then dried them on the back of his jeans.

  “You are okay? I bring to put on” he said, and left, closing the door behind him.

  Nan looked down at her bare legs. The scar along one thigh, where they’d taken the vein for her bypass, looked starker under the fluorescent light. No old-lady scribbling of blue veins, at least. If only I’d worn a skirt, she thought. No—then the cut would’ve been worse.

  Her charcoal pants lay in a heap in the bathtub. When she held them up, she saw that one leg was torn and bloody. Maybe she’d somehow landed on the metal box? The pockets were empty—the nitro pills must still be in the pocket of her Hidden Assets slip. But she didn’t seem to need them now.

  A knock on the door; then a large paint-stained hand, offering a black garment.

  “Thank you,” Nan said.

  “Please!”

  The door closed.

  Nan unfolded the garment, which turned out to be a pair of black jeans. Not something Deenie would ever wear, not unless she’d turned punk and lost thirty pounds. For God’s sake, said Nan to Nan, instead of worrying about who the owner of these pants is, you should be worrying about who the man outside the door is. And why you can’t remember being brought in here. Probably a concussion, in which case—she remembered from the Personal Safety section of HOWDY, the State Department’s handbook for wives—she shouldn’t have been moved. Well, too late now.

  Squeezing into the jeans, Nan recalled HOWDY’S warnings about just such situations as the one she now found herself in. Watch out for agents provocateurs. They most often appear to be ordinary people, unmemorable in appearance and speech (Well, she thought, that doesn’t apply to my rescuer) and proffering aid or consolation. (Uh-oh.) They tend to appear precisely when needed.

  The jeans, left unzipped, would do. They were wide-legged enough not to disturb the bandaged knee, which was something. Nan pulled her sweater down over the gap at her stomach and smoothed her hair. Then she rolled up her own torn pants and tucked them under her arm.

  “How you are feeling?” the young man asked when she opened the door. He’d been hovering in the hallway. He reached out and took her rolled-up pants, then put a hand under her elbow. This was the first chance she’d had to really look at him. Tall and lanky, with a round rosy face and that head of black curls like a Renaissance putto. A cherub’s head on a man’s body. Another kind stranger? What choice had she but to think so?

  “Better,” she said, surprised to find it was true.

  Visibly relieved, the young man led her through the hall into the living room, moving slowly to accommodate her limp. Glancing into Deenie’s bedroom as they passed, Nan saw that the metal box had disappeared.

  “My friend, Efrem, also drives taxi, he is like you. Sick with blood. But he never learns. Tries to be—how is it?—boyets?”

  Nan guessed, “Brave?”

  “Nyet, nyet—he fights other men on stage. For money. Naturally, his mantle health is never no good. At last he has nervous breakthrough.”

  They stopped in front of the sofa. The birds acknowledged their presence with a storm of scolding.

  “Look,” Nan said as the young man released her arm, “I don’t even, I mean, who are you?”—then was ashamed of her brusqueness. They seemed to have leapfrogged over preliminaries into some strange intimacy that made it too late to ask this kind of question.

  He said gently, “Please, you will sit? My name is Valeri Peshkov. I and my wife, we are friends to Mrs. Horsfal. We are caring for her house.”

  Nan found herself shaking all over with relief. She hadn’t realized till this moment how afraid she’d actually been that this man was (somehow; so soon) from Gabriel. She sat down on the sofa. Valeri Peshkov sat down beside her, occupying only the edge of the seat, as if that was all he felt entitled to.

  “I’m Nan, Nan Tice.” Two false names had, in last night’s weariness, been more than she’d felt up to. “She’s gone away, then? Deenie—I mean, Mrs. Horsfal?”

  “Da. She has gone.” His round boy-face turned unaccountably sad.

  “She’s ill” Nan suggested. “She’s in the hospital?”

  He shook his head. He put one hand over hers. It was cool and dry and heavy. Her knee began to throb, a slow steady drumbeat of pain. The birds seemed to multiply, caroling hysterically, the talker among them asking, “What’s up? What’s up? What’s up, pretty boy?”

  Valeri Peshkov turned to them and shouted, “Konyets!”

  The silence was instant. He turned back to Nan and slowly picked up her hand and folded it inside bot
h of his own.

  He said, “I am most sorry.”

  |

  For the next two days Nan went about the business of what HOWDY had termed “acclimatizing” and she and Tod had privately called “assclimb-atizing.” At odd moments she found her mind running through the litany—Bonn, Genoa, Washington, Warsaw, Bucharest, Washington. She’d done it so many times; she could do it again. Only now she was on the other side of that experience: a refugee. Alone (friendless, she thought, in the long cold nights that invited self-pity) in a strange city, a continent away from everyone close to her, except for Jane. And no one in the world knew where she was. Not even Alex, as Alex herself had insisted.

  Both mornings, Jane went happily off with Consuelo, whose plucked brows and high white forehead gave her the imperial look of a Velasquez, but whose dark eyes were kind. Nan paid her twice the Seattle rate for babysitters. Paid kindness felt safer.

  On Friday morning Nan borrowed a city map from Consuelo and made her way to the new downtown mall, where she bought a warmer winter coat—a shiny red hooded parka—for Jane. Then she walked across the river to the Old Stone Bank, a small chapel with a reassuring gold dome, to open an account in the name of Nancy Tice and deposit her rolls of hundred-dollar bills, thirty-five of them. But the assistant manager asked for ID—which Nan, of course, didn’t have. He was handsome, patronizing, and black, with skewed features like O. J. Simpson’s. “Separation?” he asked, eyeing Nan’s rumpled cash. “Bad breakup?” Nan looked past him discouragingly, but her chest widened with fear. She couldn’t afford to attract anyone’s interest. Remembering what Tod used to do when they traveled, she went back to the Frederick and begged an envelope and Scotch tape from Consuelo. She smoothed out the bills and put them in the envelope, then took out the top drawer of the dresser, taped the envelope to the underside of the dresser’s top, and replaced the drawer.

  Deenie’s death had revealed a fault line in the Plan. Without a place to stay, would Nan have enough cash to last the six weeks that Alex’s Time Line required? She had no way to get more money without revealing her identity; no way to reach Alex without revealing where she and Jane were. All she could do was wait till the appointed day—the twenty-first, almost two weeks away—and scan the Pee-Eye’s Personals. The Frederick, dim and dirty and cockroach-ridden as it was (”Sí! Sí! Las cucarachas!” Consuelo had cried when Nan complained, making them sound like some festive surprise), was too expensive. On Saturday morning Nan met with two Realtors who seemed to have only overpriced, over-carpeted condominiums for rent. In the afternoon, on Consuelo’s advice, she scanned the bulletin board at the entrance to the little grocery store across the street from the Frederick; but when she and Jane went to see the one affordable place, she panicked. The owner—an old-young woman with long, graying Pre-Raphaelite hair—had troubles of her own, which she seemed eager to impart. Nan knew how quickly the desire to share confidences could become a demand to trade them. Too dangerous.

  Standing in line at Burger King, where they went for a very late lunch, Jane demanded to know when her parents were coming. Nan should have prepared for this moment, but she’d been too busy the last two days to worry about it. She hesitated. (What had Alex told her? There hadn’t been a chance on Wednesday morning to ask, because Gabe had come home for lunch unexpectedly.) Jane began to stomp—When? When? When?—bringing her feet down hard on each when. People in line stared. She was tired and hungry, but so was Nan, and Nan lost it. They’re not, she told Jane, self-pity flooding through her. Mommy and Daddy aren’t coming. It’s just you and me, kid. Then call them to come and get me, Jane demanded, and when Nan refused, she stuck out her behind and squatted over the fake-brick floor. “If you don’t, I’ll just pee right here!”

  This scene was followed that evening by another in the lobby of the Frederick. The second one was more dangerous. Nan said No—a word almost unheard in Nanaspeak—to a second Kit Kat from the vending machine. Hands on nonexistent hips, Jane shouted, “I’m going home right now! My daddy’s coming to get me! He hates it here!” They were both exhausted: it was the very end of a long and fruitless day. Nan, who’d never spanked her own child, found herself smacking Jane’s blue-jeaned bottom. Dragging her off to the elevator under Consuelo’s reproachful gaze, she thought, This can’t go on. I’ve got to do something, got to get us out of here.

  The night was tropically hot in their small room, whose radiators clanked incessantly. Nan sat at the rickety table in the kitchen alcove while Jane huddled on the sofa bed with Ballet Dreams Barbie, today’s Bribe of the Day. On the table lay the unfolded Time Line and Nan’s cell phone. Disobeying Alex’s instructions, she’d put it in her suitcase at the last minute. Though she almost never used it, she’d become attached to it as a talisman—what Gabe, when he’d given it to her the year before, called a “worry-bypass.” Nan sat and smoked—three years now since she’d quit for good, right after her real bypass—and looked out at the swatch of cold, starless sky above the brick building across the street. She’d struck her granddaughter. How could she have done such a thing?

  Horror at her once-unthinkable action mingled with dismay at her loss. Jane was her tenderness object. Had been so from the day Alex and Gabriel had brought her home, two days old, and Nan had cut her fingernails, thin and frail as insects’ wings, because she kept scratching her cheeks with them and Gabe had already left for the hospital and Alex was afraid to bring scissors near her squalling, battling baby. From that day when, looking down at the small, red, ferocious face, Nan had felt, for the first time since Tod’s death, light.

  There was a singed smell coming from the radiator. Nan got up and went to turn over Jane’s white blouse and red corduroy jumper, which she’d draped over it to dry. Every night now she washed one of Jane’s two outfits in the bathroom sink, thinking wistfully of The Nannies. Leaving Seattle with one small suitcase—all Nan could comfortably carry—meant taking few clothes for either of them. She’d planned on borrowing from Deenie and having enough money to buy new ones for Jane. She sat down again at the kitchen table. She had to think of something to tell Jane, something that would persuade her of the necessity for this trip. Something that would comfort her for the loss of her parents, her home, her preschool, her friends. But what? What on earth could do that?

  Alex should have explained to her, Nan thought—made up some plausible story. It’s a mother’s job.

  She put out a hand and touched the cell phone. She turned it on. The MESSAGE icon in its little window began blinking. Instantly her anger was swamped by a wave of fear, her whole body going hot, then cold. Only Alex and Gabe had this number. Without stopping to think, she punched DELETE, then switched the phone off. She crumpled the Time Line—What use was all of Alex’s planning now?—and tossed it on the bed, then threw the cell phone after it. She lit another Marlboro, letting the match burn down until it seared her fingers, the way Deenie, laughing, used to do.

  Deenie.

  The tears Nan would, when younger, have shed were now a pressure, hard and unyielding, between her throat and her diaphragm. It had been years since she’d cried; tears, she’d realized during Tod’s long dying, were nearly always for the one who cried them. That discovery seemed to dry them up. In any case, Deenie was linked, for Nan, not with tears but with laughter. That pope with chronic hiccups, Pius XII, whom they’d prayed for every morning in homeroom—while Deenie, beside her, hiccuped softly into her folded hands. Whispered exchanges after school in the empty, beeswax-smelling chapel. Deenie: Why did God make man first? Nan: Why? Deenie: Because every masterpiece needs a mock-up.

  The smoke from Nan’s cigarette dreamed its way toward the ceiling and out the window, which she’d opened at the top in deference to Jane’s young lungs. Her wounded knee throbbed, but distantly. She supposed it was healing. She hadn’t seen a doctor; some confused recollection of old noir detective movies—never take your gunshot wound to a hospital—had prevented her. On the building across the street a billboard offered
what looked like DENIAL INSURANCE; lifting up her glasses to look through them, she saw it was DENTAL INSURANCE. The building housed a small grocery store called the Food Basket, patronized chiefly by old people. Their backs in dark winter coats were S-shaped, like vultures: dowager’s hump, Deenie called it. Would have called it.

  She didn’t even know what Deenie had died of. Her Russian housesitter had said, incomprehensibly, “a delicate fever”; the hospital, when Nan phoned, had refused to say. Whatever it was, did that explain Deenie’s sudden move from Chicago to Providence?

  The Food Basket’s windows threw golden parallelograms of light across the sidewalk. Nan watched two women try to enter by the same door at the same time, their walkers tangling. A young man in a green shirt came running out to help.

  Driving her back from Deenie’s house in his taxi, whose bumpers seemed to be held together by duct tape, Valeri Peshkov had explained. The cremation—of course Deenie would have wanted to be cremated—had been the week before. He, Val (“Please, you must to call me, it is typical American”), was keeping the ashes for Mrs. Horsfal’s cousin. Nan thought of other funerals. Her mother’s (which she could barely remember); her father’s; her grandmother’s; Tod’s. No wisdom had accrued to her from their deaths. Lines from a poem memorized long ago echoed in the night silence.

  Are flower and seed the same?

  What do the great dead say?

  At eight thirty the Food Basket’s lights went out. Wishing heartily that she’d observed The Nannies more closely when she’d had the chance, Nan rose, stubbed out her cigarette, and went to coax Jane into bed. (Bed was a narrow mattress on the floor of the big walk-in closet, covered with a clean, fraying sky-blue quilt: yet another reason for leaving the Frederick.) Nan helped Jane pull on the soft white T-shirt—one of Nan’s—that served as a makeshift nightgown, read to her (Goodnight Moon—yesterday’s bribe), sang to her (“Zombie Jamboree”—tonight’s request from their private stock of not-very-PC lullabies), kissed her good night, and Squirrel as well. Remnants of their nighttime ritual in the old adored-grandmother days, all of which Jane, frighteningly docile now after the spanking, merely endured. Nan’s heart ached, for Jane, for (Be honest!) herself. She thought, We are both lost.