The Year She Disappeared

by Ann Harleman

  Nan shifted from one foot to the other. Her back hurt from a night on Nibbrig’s mattress. How to get rid of him? He definitely wasn’t buying the idea of a wrong number.

  “Who is it?” Jane asked. “Zipper, stop it right now!”

  Nan put a hand over the mouthpiece. “Nobody. Someone for Mr. Nibbrig.”

  “Hello? Mrs. Tice?”

  Into the mouthpiece she said, “My husband was a, a distant cousin of Deen—of Geraldine’s. I didn’t really know her.”

  Jane was at her elbow, grabbing for the phone. “I wanna talk!”

  Nan held the receiver up out of reach. Jane shouted, “Mama! Mama!”

  Nan put her free arm around Jane’s shoulders and squeezed. “Be quiet! It’s not your mother.”

  Above their heads a tiny voice said, “Mrs. Tice? Mrs. Tice?”

  Jane squirmed, flailed, kicked Nan’s ankle hard. Reflexively, Nan let go. Jane retreated, on her face a look of pure rage.

  A beautiful day in the neighborhood, Mr. Rogers crooned.

  “Any rate, some of these people seem to be from Geraldine’s childhood. Your husband might’ve mentioned them—”

  “I can’t help you. I’m sorry. Good-bye.” Nan hung up more heavily than she’d meant to.

  A wonderful day for neighbors! Will you be mine?

  She crossed the room and knelt down, knees creaking, beside her granddaughter. “Listen, Grape Eyes,” she began.

  Jane turned away, her eyes on the TV. Two fingers rubbed her forehead in that anxious Alex-gesture.

  “Sweetpea. That wasn’t your mama. Remember what we talked about? Your mama loves you dearly. But she can’t be with you right now. She wants you to be here, in Providence, with me. So that you’ll be safe.”

  A sharp movement of Jane’s shoulders under her not-very-clean turtleneck said, Nothing doing.

  “Just for now. She’ll call us as soon as she can. I promise!”

  Over her shoulder Jane shot a look at Nan—her anger replaced by a weary, unchildlike skepticism—then turned her gaze back to the television.

  The telephone began to ring.

  “Come on, sweetie!” Nan cried, falsely gay. “Let’s go shopping!”

  Another Barbie doll (Fashion Fever Barbie had recently been mentioned) might just turn Jane’s mood around. When in doubt, bribe. Nan got up and went to the coat tree for Jane’s parka and tossed it across the room to her. The ringing of the phone showered around them, clear and chill and insistent.

  |

  A new experience for Nan Mulholland: the tedium-laced-with-fury that hours on end with small children evoked. The squabbles, tears, snacktime, bathtime, bedtime—the sheer labor of it. The wakeful nights, the nights of watching, the fears. How did Alex do it, day after day? Nan had always told herself that even the worst of parents gave a great, great gift. Now, half dragging her daughter’s daughter along the snow-swept length of Weybosset Street, she wondered: without the State Department’s assistance—the long procession of The Nannies—what kind of mother would she have been? What kind of mother had she been? Not, she feared, much of one. Yet who else was there, then or now?

  |

  On December 21—one of the two days each month when Alex would leave Nan a message in the Pee-Eye’s Personals—Nan dragged a protesting Jane down icy city streets from one newsstand to another.

  Red’s All-Season News, News of the World, Barnes & Noble—none of them carried the Pee-Eye. The large woman behind the counter at Red’s said, sounding incredulous, “Seattle, Washington?” She wore a sky-blue sweatshirt that said, SINGLE WOMEN CAN’T FART … THEY DON’T HAVE AN ASSHOLE UNTIL THEY’RE MARRIED. The rich smell of cigars in the little shop made Nan, for an instant, see Gabriel, his concerned forehead, his silvery eyes. Jane crossed to the other side of the shop to gaze into a flat glass-topped case. “Try the library over at Brown,” CAN’T FART said. “The one they named after that rich guy, what’s-his-face.” Jane folded back the glass lid and began to touch the cigars lightly, delicately. “Only, you gotta have a Brown ID to get in.”

  Two days later, armed with a faculty card procured for her by Val, Nan left Jane happily making s’mores with Mel and took a bus to the university. Wearing—in order to look scholarly—the glasses usually reserved for furtive snatches of clear-sightedness, she slid the card through the Rockefeller Library’s scanner. The nimblest imagination could not have found much likeness between her and Victoria Uglow (FAC). But she needn’t have worried. The dreadlocked young woman in the entrance booth didn’t even glance up from her book.

  In the Reference Room a thin, dark, intense-looking man—Ben Kingsley as Gandhi—showed Nan how to use the computer to search for the Pee-Eye in a database called Lexis or Nexus, like a pornographic novel by Henry Miller. When she got stuck, which was almost immediately, a peach-faced Asian girl at the next machine helped her. They found the Pee-Eye, the December 21 issue, the Personals. “OLD FLAME FINDERS: Give us a call and find that lost love.” “MOTHER PEARL: Removes evil, bad luck. Helps business, lost nature, falling hair. Results 10 hours.” Several minutes of mega-scrolling, as her helper, Seung-Won, called it, yielded, at last, a message from Alex.

  POOKIE: Everything going according to plan.

  Kiss her for me. HIPPIE

  Deaf to the shuffling and sniffling and whispering of the students all around her, Nan sat gazing at the screen as if the tiny glimmering words could be made to yield up more. Yield up Alex herself. The message was meant to reassure Nan; yet somehow it made her feel worse. Because it pulled her out of the life, so new and so fragile, that she’d begun to construct for herself and Jane? Made her remember that that life was a stopgap, a step in someone else’s dream?

  Hope you’re okay would have been nice, she told the glowing monitor. Thank you would have been nice. Still, the foolish nicknames—Pookie, Hippie—warmed her, and she felt her lips curve into a grudging smile.

  She fished in her purse and pulled out the Time Line. Her cell phone came with it, falling onto the desk with a clatter. Nan unfolded the paper, which by now had the softness of an old diaper, and spread it out in front of her. Two weeks since she and Jane had left Seattle. That night, after they’d gone, Alex would have faked a phone call from Nan, then told Gabriel that his daughter was staying overnight with her grandmother. The next day—the ninth, twelve days ago now—she’d have waited till Gabriel went to the hospital, then packed a bag and left. Nan didn’t know where, because Alex had insisted on neither of them knowing the other’s whereabouts. Once Alex was safe, she’d have phoned to tell Gabriel that Jane was all right, but not where she was. What would Gabe do then?

  On her way out of the library, Nan’s cell phone rang. At first she didn’t recognize the sound and looked around to see where it was coming from. When she realized, fear flashed over her. She scrabbled in her purse for the phone and pulled it out. The little window said, “Unavailable.” It gave one last ring and stopped; the window went blank.

  Quickly she pushed OFF. Falling out of her purse earlier must have turned it on. She knew that a cell phone—even turned on, even ringing—could not physically be traced. But still, she’d been careful to keep it turned off. Now she felt, irrationally, that it might somehow give away her whereabouts. Hadn’t Alex forbidden her to take it with her? Feeling hounded, she walked down College Street toward the river, holding the phone out in front of her like something contaminated. She didn’t want it. But how could she get rid of it? If she threw it away, someone might find it, and use it. What if then it could be traced?

  HOWDY’S words of wisdom came back to her. Should you find yourself in a compromised position, be certain you do not have on your person any incriminating documents. Burn them, or in circumstances where this is not feasible, swallow or otherwise irrecoverably dispose of them.

  At the bottom of the hill, where it met the river, the street turned into one of the little arched Venetian bridges. The breeze off the river touched Nan’s face with welcome cold. She breat
hed deep: the fishy smell of the unseen ocean, the sooty smell of approaching snow. Heartening, both. She held the phone down by her side and walked close to the low stone wall overlooking the water. When she was sure no one was looking, she stretched out her arm and let the phone fall, pausing just long enough to hear the splash.

  |

  “You’re next!”

  Mel waved the glue gun at Nan. They were almost finished reupholstering the accountant’s sofa. Back: pinto-print velveteen; arms: canary-yellow corduroy (right), American flag (left); seat cushions: a demure blue-and-green plaid that Mel called “Catholic Schoolgirl.” It was their Christmas gift, hers and Val’s, to Nan and Jane.

  Mel aimed the gun and reglued a stubborn corner of the flag, then ducked back under the branches of a fig tree to survey her work. “This is truly kiss-ass!”

  “Mr. Nibbrig—”

  “Oh, crap sandwich! It was ugly, it was ancient, and it was brown. Major sludge. Anyway, Niblets won’t be back for a year. Maybe never—maybe he’ll get eaten by llamas, or something.”

  “There aren’t any llamas in the Himalayas.”

  “Whatever. Then you and Jane can stay here for good. Wouldn’t that be great, Janey?”

  Jane shrugged. She was sitting on her bed—the poppy-printed screen was folded back during the day—leafing listlessly through an oversized book called What Do People Do All Day? Now and then she raised her head to look up at the blue spruce that stood in front of the tall windows, its hastily bought ornaments polished by the genial winter sunshine pouring through the loft. It was the day before Christmas.

  “Hold this down, right here,” Mel said to Nan. “That’s it.” The glue gun made little spitting sounds. The smell of hot glue, like baked beans burning, filled Nan’s nostrils.

  “Seriously, though,” Mel went on, squeezing the trigger, squinting, smoothing, her fingers turning the raw edge of the flag under as she went. “Your look could use an update. No offense.”

  Nan said nothing. Her new life didn’t have the space in it for self-scrutiny that her old one had had. There seemed to be no reason to consult a mirror—in fact, there was no mirror. Unless you counted the dim door of the medicine cabinet or the shoulders-to-ankle mirror eccentrically affixed to the refrigerator. How odd: her apartment in West Seattle, as Alex had once pointed out, averaged two mirrors per room.

  “To start with, you could quit baking your hair.”

  It was true that Nan’s hair, too long now and out of shape, drooped like spaniel ears against her cheeks. Mel’s own hair, since Nan had seen her last, had sprouted neon-green bangs, which she kept brushing out of her eyes with one muscular forearm.

  “I’m so glad I had this fabric.” Mel stroked the lumpy white-stars-on-blue. “Hold it down right there. No, there. It’s wicked hard to find good stuff now. This’ll last for, like, decades.”

  It looked as if it already had: the blue was faded in irregular patches, the points of the stars dulled as if by generations of thumbs.

  “Where did you get it?” Nan asked. Why did I agree to it? she thought.

  “Had it since I was a kid. My second foster mother gave it to me when I left. Her husband was killed in Vietnam, and they gave her this for his coffin. Hand me those straight pins, will you?”

  “You grew up in foster homes?”

  “All my life,” Mel said cheerfully through a mouthful of pins. “My real mom was on heroin, she OD’ed when I was two. They told me all this—the caseworkers, in Beloit. Cheeseballs! They think they have to warn you, you know? That you have these genes.”

  Did this account, Nan wondered, for Mel’s peculiar combination of fragility and strength? Striving conscientiously to bridge the gap between youth and age (Age! thought Nan incredulously, when did that happen?), she said, “That must have been hard.”

  “People think, oh, Wisconsin, heartland, cows, corn. Beloit! The only town whose name sounds like a fart in a bathtub.”

  There was a silence, broken only by the brisk little explosions of the glue gun, the slap of Jane’s page turning. “There were just always too many of us, that was the thing. People take more children than they can handle. You get the same amount of money for each child, and after a point another kid more doesn’t really cost anything. That’s how I got my name. You can take your finger off now. This side’s done.”

  Gratefully Nan fell back onto her haunches, then sat. She brushed away the fronds of a date palm. Her knees seemed to have turned to cinders. “I just assumed ‘Mel’ was short for Melissa.”

  Mel laughed her Marlene Dietrich laugh. No, it seemed her third foster mother had christened her “Mellow”—this child who understood by then that everything depended on not making waves—and it had stuck. By the time she’d come east, on a full scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design, she no longer knew herself by her real name.

  Moved that Mel would confide all this, Nan knew she should be grateful that she didn’t seem to expect any revelations in return. Yet for a moment she wished she could make them, wished they were being demanded. How isolating it was to keep a secret. How lonely.

  Recognizing in Mel’s confiding mood an opportunity that might not come again, Nan said, “You and Mrs. Horsfal, you were close?”

  “She was, like, my role model. But you two—you were really tight, huh?”

  “She was my best friend in the world.” Nan took a breath. “How did she die, exactly?”

  “Peacefully, I think.”

  “No, I meant, what of?”

  Suddenly Mel was busy filling her mouth with pins, sighting down the glue gun. “Um … pneumonia. Yeah, that’s it—pneumonia. Let’s do the other arm. Where’d I put that corduroy?” Though it lay on the floor, neatly folded, between them. Nan shook it out and handed it to Mel, then stood up, knees creaking. They moved to the other end of the sofa.

  “Pneumonia? Mel, are you sure? Hardly anybody dies of pneumonia these days.”

  Mel mumbled through her pins, “This cloth’ll really stand up.”

  “So you said.”

  Something strange, then, about Deenie’s death. No use trying to get the truth out of Mel: clearly, her own secrets were the only ones she was prepared to confide. Did people die of pneumonia now? Nan had guessed some kind of cancer, like Tod; had pictured Deenie suffering and waiting, like Tod. And all without Nan. Why hadn’t Deenie told her?

  If only she could have a cigarette! Kneeling down again, a little painfully, in a pool of sunlight that gilded Mel’s busy hands and threw the shadow of the Christmas tree across her face, Nan felt chilled. Too many secrets. Secrets within secrets.

  “Hey, Janey!” Mel said over her shoulder. “Whaddaya think?”

  In her voice was a hunger Nan had heard before. Now, after Mel’s revelations, she understood it: a feeling of fellowship with motherless, transient Jane. She felt a flash of anger that anyone should see Jane’s situation that way. I’m with her, she thought; Jane has me.

  Jane shrugged without looking up. It was one of her silent, sullen days. They seemed to alternate with days of hair-trigger touchiness and still other days of eerily cheerful, grown-up composure. Reminded of Alex’s teenage years, Nan had fallen back on the same strategy (if you could call it that) that she’d used then: give up trying to predict, much less improve, these moods, and just try to weather them.

  The phone rang.

  Mel said, “Answer that, Janey, will you? I need your grandma’s fingers. So, Nan, I’m serious. We could do you next. Pinch it, right there. No—both hands. Update your hair. Maybe do a small tattoo. On your shoulder, or the back of your hand. A rose, maybe. No—too many of those around. Something more, like, stately.”

  Nan wasn’t listening. Yeah, Jane was saying, uh-huh … Yeah, we are … Okay! When she hung up from this litany of affirmation, Nan said, fear clogging her throat, “Who was that, Grape Eyes?”

  “Hold still, Nan!” Mel said. “Don’t fade on me.”

  “A long, um, a lost-along relative,” Ja
ne said. She climbed back onto her bed and disappeared behind her book.

  “Who? What was their name? Jane!”

  “I forget. He said he’ll be over in a Jeffrey.”

  “He’s coming here?”

  Mel said, “I didn’t know you guys had relatives in Rhode Island. There! We’re done. Gimme five!” She picked up Nan’s hand and turned it over and slapped her palm, then stood up. No surveying her handiwork; she was already pulling on her jacket.

  “We’ll go with you,” Nan said, thinking, Be over in a jiffy? We’ll see about that.

  She hauled herself to her feet. Mere seconds later, clattering down the stairs with their coats under her arm and Jane by the resisting hand, she thought, That does it! Preschool for you, my little chickadee. And freedom, freedom for me.

  |

  Somehow they got through Christmas. Nan, who’d never made much of holidays—they’d always seemed, in foreign places, irrelevant—did her best. A stocking hung from Nibbrig’s tallest fig tree. Gifts under the blue spruce for Jane, who cried that night but would not say why, would not say she missed her mama—or her daddy. A Russian New Year’s feast at Val and Mel’s. Flashback to a New Year’s night in Bonn—Tod’s first posting—the narrow house filled with the smells of silver fir and cedar and newly papered walls, the new baby upstairs in the nursery, Nan moving among her guests, feeling them catch and hold her happiness, one by one, like candles lighting.

  |

  The January thaw came early. On the seventh Nan woke feeling sure today’s message from Alex would say that she’d gotten custody, that she was coming for Jane—maybe even name the day.

  She walked up the steps of what she’d learned, from the students, to call “the Rock,” under bare branches that dripped icy water onto her hatless head, her shoulders. In the Reference Room she sat down without unbuttoning her coat. She didn’t have much time: Mel could only keep Jane till eleven. Behind the semicircular desk Ben Kingsley smiled and nodded. Nan clicked her way into Lexis/Nexus unaided. The Pee-Eye offered stories about an eight-year-old boy with leukemia who ran away from home rather than face more chemotherapy; about Mexico City’s plan to use giant fans to solve the pollution problem; about the Washington State Supreme Court’s refusal to force a man to let his ex-wife be impregnated with their frozen embryo. Nan raced through them to the Personals. But no amount of mega-scrolling yielded a message from Alex.