The Year She Disappeared

by Ann Harleman

  Sounds were suddenly magnified: a pencil dropping, boot heels on the marble floor, the juicy coughs of students. Nan felt as if she couldn’t get her breath. As if the wide, windowless room were narrowing, the ranks of computers crowding in on her. She looked wildly around at the lighted monitors, like blind, bland faces.

  Get out. Get air.

  Outside in the weirdly warm morning, she sat down on a wooden bench embraced by a tangle of dripping branches like huge black parentheses.

  Remember the Plan.

  Nan pulled the Time Line out of her pocket. When she opened it, she had to hold it together where it gaped along the fold lines. One month since she and Jane had left Seattle. According to her first message, the one she’d sent on December 21, Alex had already moved out of the beautiful old house on Queen Anne Hill, had filed the petition for temporary custody of Jane. By now she should have seen her lawyer and filed for divorce; by now the motion for temporary custody should have been granted.

  Had something gone wrong? Alex had seemed sure that Gabriel would not file a countermotion. But what if he had? That would drag things out—but this long? Or had the legal stuff been delayed because of the holidays? Was Alex all right? Had Gabriel somehow prevented her from sending a message? Or even persuaded her to abandon the Plan? Because he would certainly try. Could Alex hold out against him—intelligent, compelling, formidable Gabriel?

  He’d been forty when Nan met him, thirteen years older than Alex, fourteen years younger than Nan. Never married. A reconstructive surgeon who worked with burned children. Primed by Alex with his sterling résumé (burned children? pro bono one afternoon a week at a rundown hospital in the Central District? summer vacations donated to a clinic in the highlands of Guatemala?), Nan had expected to meet a man with a Public Conscience, a man who wasn’t interested in people, not one at a time, not close up. Early June, six years ago, six months before Tod died. One of the long, light-filled evenings just before the solstice. Nan was late, held up at the hospital waiting to talk to Tod’s radiologist. Hesitating inside the restaurant entrance, she didn’t see Alex until the man with her stood up and waved. Seated, Alex leaned toward him as if caught in his magnetic field, a list that Nan recognized at once. Before she was even close enough to perceive her daughter’s radiance, she knew. This was the man her daughter would marry. Shaking his hand, she felt an echo of the old itchy excitement, the buzz that always used to accompany encounters with attractive men. The intensity of his gaze, even at that first meeting, made her feel completely seen. Tall, silver-haired, silver-eyed. Should a mother be so drawn to her daughter’s suitor? Motherless Nan didn’t know.

  At the end of the meal Gabriel ordered Calvados and clementines, and they sat peeling the small plump globes with their fingers. The fragrance mingled with the odor of Gabriel’s cigar, which no one came to ask him to put out. Alex sat smiling, her eyes roaming the restaurant, unaware of her companions—unaware of Gabriel. As if drawn by her inattention, he turned to her. The horizontal groove in his forehead deepened, giving him the look of tender inquiry that Nan would come to know well. She thought, So that’s how it is. If he’s afraid he might have lost you, even for a moment, he’s yours. He’ll move heaven and earth to repossess you. Does Alex know that? A waiter had come just then and lit the candles in the wall sconce behind them. A shadow had fallen across the table with its litter of bright curving peels and cigar ash and half-full wineglasses: Gabriel’s shadow with Alex’s diminishing into it.

  Nan sat and smoked. There was still half an hour before she had to pick up Jane. The sky was a bright, bottomless blue. High above, a silver plane moved across it, leaving a vapor trail like a white zipper. Nan watched it loosen and dissolve. Wasn’t it possible that the legal system—as pokey and ponderous as she knew it to be—could take a month to decide the temporary fate of one small child? Surely Gabe wouldn’t risk jeopardizing the outcome. He would simply call on his many influential connections and wait for the courts to decide in his favor. Possessory rights: the very phrase sounded like Gabriel. He would bide his time. He’d wait.

  All around her, wet branches clicked in the warm wind, which moved hesitatingly across her face, through her hair. The rhythmic sound of the bare branches did something to time, slowed it, like the ticking of an old-fashioned pendulum clock. She, Nan, would also wait—but trust in the opposite outcome. What choice did she have?

  |

  A regular preschool, Nan knew, wouldn’t take Jane without some sort of ID, would maybe even demand a parent’s authorization. She couldn’t risk it. Anyway, home care was cheaper, and not having heard from Alex had made Nan’s store of cash look alarmingly small. She found Mikki from an ad on the Food Basket’s bulletin board. Unlicensed, Mikki took more children than the state allowed, but she had a helper, another moonfaced Japanese woman who spoke no English, as far as Nan could tell. Mikki, herself a grandmother, seemed kind. Her rambling apartment over the Hope Street Deli was reassuringly messy. She showed Nan the indoor jungle gym, the many-colored inflatable tent, the Lego city under construction. “My grandson, they too old now,” she said. “So I take children, fill up space all day.” The children—three girls and two boys, all younger than Jane, and a baby asleep in a red canvas swing—seemed happy. Mikki introduced them by name, even the baby, and they greeted Nan and Jane politely.

  The girl nearest Jane’s age tossed tight blond pigtails over her shoulders and grabbed Jane’s hand. Jane followed her to a corner filled with dolls and stuffed animals.

  If only I knew what to look for, Nan thought. The Nannies had all been chosen (vetted, a word that made her picture them as sheepdogs) by the Foreign Service. Nan had had veto power, exercised only once (hairy, perfume-drenched Monika, in Bucharest). She’d never had to go out and look for Alex’s caretakers, and Alex had always been cared for at home, more or less under Nan’s eye.

  There was a playground two blocks away, on Rochambeau Avenue, Mikki told Nan. And in the summertime, the chestnuts—she gestured to the bare branches crowding the windows—shaded the apartment “like in countryside, like in the mountain.”

  Mikki gave Nan a cup of green tea and some cookies that tasted of anise, and they sat in the little kitchen while she explained hours, fees, rules (“No biting! No hitting! Second time happen, child leave my house”), naps, snacks, occasional excursions. They agreed that Nan would bring Jane back the following day and, if that worked out, every weekday from ten to three. (Five whole hours, thought Nan: bliss!) A small boy, sepia-skinned, perhaps a year and a half old, toddled into the kitchen and up to Nan. The way he held on to the leg of her pants, two fistfuls, suggested he was new to walking. “Hi, there.” Nan smiled down at him. “Whose special boy are you?” He considered this question in silence, weighing it.

  Nan gave Mikki four twenty-dollar bills, half a week’s fee. When she went to the doll corner to say that it was time to go, Jane cried. A good sign—this, at least, she knew from the years of The Nannies. A good beginning. She left with the distinct sense that Jane was on probation; but still. A good beginning.

  |

  Most mornings Nan went to the library after she’d left Jane with Mikki. Descending Mikki’s carefully shoveled steps, she was surprised each time to feel a quick, sharp pang of loss. The number 42 bus took her down Thayer Street to the edge of campus. At Peaberry’s Café (where else could she go and be warm, entertained, and unnoticed?), she smoked a single cigarette and warmed her hands around a cup of coffee, then cut across the Quad to the library. She took comfort from its brightness, its smells of paper and decaying leather and dust, the dim hum of fluorescent lights, the sweatshirted backs of students bent in concentration. The first morning she sat in the sunny, many-windowed Periodicals Room reading old copies of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar (a university library, who would have thought it?), limp from the palms of strangers. This palled sooner than it might once have done. Looking around at students and faculty perusing things like Mind and the Journal of English Linguistics,
Nan felt the prod of conscience. What was she doing pondering ads for expensively unironed clothes in colors like “balsam” and “tusk”? Here she was in a major research library; and here was her own granddaughter crying out, as much as any child ever had, for major research. On the second morning she went to the Information Desk, where Ben Kingsley directed her to a section on B Floor.

  |

  The woman on trial for abduction because she’d taken her small daughter to Mexico after becoming convinced that her ex-husband was molesting her.

  The woman who died of lung cancer because she was afraid to seek medical help while she and her children were in hiding from their father.

  The woman who spent two years in jail in contempt of court for refusing to say where she’d hidden her three-year-old son.

  The woman whose ex-husband, after a judge denied him custody, put their four-year-old daughter in the car, fastened their seat belts, and drove off the Aurora Bridge into Lake Washington.

  It’s not what might happen to you, Nan reminded herself; it’s what happened (or didn’t?) to Jane.

  Seven Signs of Child Sexual Abuse:

  •sexually suggestive language

  •touching body parts of self & others

  •acting out sex or sexual positions with dolls

  •nightmares

  •initiating sex games with other children

  •vaginal infections/discharge

  •hemorrhoids

  Nan put her face in her hands. How could anyone—anyone— She thought of Gabriel’s mother, the beatings, the tears, the glad little boy running to meet the pickup truck.

  In the carrel behind her, two young men spoke in urgent whispers.

  “I got beet red. Hadda hide behind a magazine when she walked by.”

  “Just ’cause you come into the Periodicals Room doesn’t mean she has some innate obligation to sit there till you get it up to ask her to dinner.”

  “She said, ‘See you around.’ That’s what I said to her the time before.”

  “So … she was alluding to the last time you were together. That’s a good sign.”

  What pretty problems to have, thought Nan, how lovely to be young.

  But then, Jane was young.

  Every afternoon at three o’clock she picked Jane up from Mikki’s, and every afternoon, zipping her into her scarlet parka, she whispered into her ear, “A runcible cat!” Some days, Jane whispered back, “With crimson whiskers!” In good weather they walked to Newport Creamery and then to Bajnotti Fountain. Some days, Jane allowed Nan to put an arm around her shoulders. Some days, she leaned against Nan’s chest. They sat on the fountain’s lip with their feet dangling over the edge, companionably licking their cones, and watched the chickadees, tiny black-masked bandits, forage through the leaf mold in the fountain’s stone basin.

  |

  More clothes, was what Nan had in mind—clean clothes. She hated the spider-thronged laundry room in the basement of their building, the rubbery smell of rats, the many stairs back and forth, and had allowed their small stock of clothing to get dingier and dingier. On Friday of Jane’s second week at day care, Nan picked her up as usual, paid Mikki in carefully counted bills, then headed down Hope Street. The January thaw still held. In the strange, bright, wintry gloom—clouds with a sense of the sun behind them—the wet streets were a blur of rain-blown figures. A girl in a purple slicker scudded toward them, laughing, in the wind-filled block between Mikki’s building and Rochambeau Avenue.

  “Nana,” Jane said, “were you alive when the world was black and white?”

  Nan looked down at her small heart-shaped face, wet bangs pasted to her forehead in a row of question marks. “What do you mean, honey?”

  “You know, like on TV. Like Shirley Temple.”

  Nan laughed. “No. I mean, the world was the same colors when I was your age as it is now. It’s just, there was only black-and-white film to make movies with. Like newspapers.”

  Jane looked disappointed. “You’re hurting my fingers,” she said.

  Nan loosened her grip, but only slightly. The wind was like a hand on her back, pushing her forward.

  The store on Hope Street, Small Change, had been recommended by Mikki—good cheap secondhand children’s clothing and toys. Nan bought recklessly. Surely Alex’s message, when it appeared on Monday, would provide her and Jane with the agreed-upon plenty of money? Jane’s eyes shone at the bright turtlenecks and the angora cardigan with a rose appliquéd to the pocket and the hot-pink overalls—She takes after me, thought Nan, with the old quick thrill of pride—not to mention several children’s books and a metal loom with a dozen skeins of colored yarn. Farther down the street was a women’s consignment shop called Act II, the name a good sign, Nan felt. Coming into its well-lit warmth, she was met by the musty, human smell of used clothing. For an instant she was back in her grandmother’s secondhand store, where she’d spent every afternoon after school; was back at Jane’s age, or a bit older, a little girl reading book after book, sitting in a child-size rocking chair between rows of garments. She could still recall the racks of evening dresses in tissue-thin silk, chiffon, buttery velvet; rhinestones and sequins; white kid gloves the texture of gardenias. The gleam and glamour of those clothes! Dorothea (she’d refused to answer to “Gran” or “Grandma”) would have been about fifty then, near the end of World War II. The store had been a comedown for her—she’d been a pilot in the years after World War I, testing searchlight defenses and towing targets for gunnery practice—but someone had to care for motherless Nan.

  “Nana!” Jane hung on Nan’s arm, pulling her out of her reverie. “I’m hungry. And I have to pee.” Choosing quickly, Nan bought a number of serviceable garments—pants, shirts, a thick woolen sweater—in colors that verged on dirt. The kind of clothing worn by The Nannies.

  After lunch at Burger King, where by now Nan actually had a favorite meal, they caught the bus back downtown. They sat in the front seat (Jane’s choice) and watched the wipers caress the big windows while their wet coats steamed in the warmth. At Kennedy Plaza four men in Santa Claus suits sat down across from them. What in the world could they be doing now, nearly three weeks after Christmas? One opened a newspaper and another, a black man, sat ruminatively twanging the elastic of his beard. Jane watched, frowning. As far as Nan knew, she still believed in Santa. Jane’s head lifted, and Nan followed her gaze. Above the four Santas’ heads an ad advised, “Child Support Is Every Child’s Right. Call 1-800-FIND DAD.” Maybe she could read? “Dad” was the simplest of words. Nan sighed. In their six weeks of exile there had been no sign from Jane that would have indicated, one way or the other, whether Gabriel had interfered (the nuns’ word, long ago) with her. In fact, since her angry outburst in front of Consuelo, when they were leaving the Fred, Jane had not once mentioned her father. This seemed, to Nan, the most ominous thing.

  Ask her. At least give her a chance to talk about him—if she wants to.

  Afraid, uncertain, she looked out the window where Jane had rubbed a clear spot like a porthole in the steam. The bus turned along the river, or rather, along the construction that was in the process of uncovering the river. Raw cement roadbed lay broken, wetly gleaming. Nan watched a worker apply a gunlike instrument to a row of iron spikes, one after another: a blue-diamond burst of flame, a shower of golden sparks. The figure straightened, turning toward the bus windows, and raised its face guard. Nan saw with surprise that it was a woman.

  Could I do that? But I’ll never have to. Alex will arrange about money—she will. And anyway, this whole trip—this exile—won’t be for long.

  The woman met Nan’s eyes, then wiped her face on the sleeve of her green padded jacket. With a jerk, the bus started again.

  Nan hadn’t, so far, seen any of the Seven Signs in Jane. But one article had said that about one-third of abused children never showed any symptoms. One-third! She remembered how Deenie’s father used to come and stand behind her on the pretext of helping her on wit
h her coat; how he’d rest his palms on her shoulders, holding her still until she could feel his erection in the small of her back. But she’d been thirteen, fourteen. Old enough to laugh it off; to feel, even, a little proud of her power.

  The black Santa removed his red tasseled cap and shook it so that drops of rain flew off and struck Nan.

  The way he touches her, Mama. The way he looks at her. He’d been putting her to bed—His bathrobe was untied—

  Alex’s distress, her pain: there had been no possibility of doubting her. Yet what, really, had she seen? A father putting his daughter to sleep. She, Nan, didn’t know what Gabriel had done, only what Alex believed he had done. So easy to slip, one small step at a time, from kissing the plump little elbows to—Nan didn’t know how many unthinkable steps Gabriel might have slid, slipped, slithered. Alex herself didn’t know. Not know.

  At Westminster Street the four Santa Clauses disembarked. Jane leaned against Nan, who put her arm around her, but lightly. As if to reward her, Jane crept closer, finally snuggled.

  Nan hesitated; then she said, “Those Santa Clauses were funny, weren’t they?”

  Jane said nothing, but Nan could feel her listening. The articles she’d read at the Rock had recommended an oblique approach. They warned about whole nurseries full of children making false accusations to please adult questioners. Don’t ask leading questions. Don’t suggest particular events. Don’t criticize a child’s response.

  The bus continued its majestic progress down Point Street. Each time the doors opened, the smell of leaf mold and wet cinders swept in on a wedge of cold air.