The Year She Disappeared

by Ann Harleman

  Nan said, “That one on the aisle looked a little like your daddy.” He’d been tall and silver-haired.

  Jane stiffened.

  Gently; gently. “You miss your daddy? I do.”

  Did Jane’s head tilt toward Nan?

  Open-ended questions, the articles recommended, to guard against the possibility of making a wound out of what had been merely an event. The abused child may not realize what has been done to him or her, or may not feel it as an injury at all.

  “My daddy stuck my milk money in Larry Boy’s super-suction ear, and then he shaked him upside down.”

  “He did? And then what happened?”

  “Then Mama cried. It’s not nice to tease people.”

  “What did your daddy do then?”

  Jane pulled away, sliding along the seat until no part of her was touching Nan. She began to blow a bubble with her gum. The bright pink globe widened and thinned, wobbled alarmingly between her lips. Looking sideways at Nan, she puffed. The bubble burst. Sticky pale webbing covered her nose and mouth; in her eyes, very green now and fixed on Nan, there gleamed some kind of warning.

  Nan was afraid to press further. Afraid of hurting Jane, afraid (Be honest!) of driving Jane away. Coward! she accused herself. But she couldn’t risk it. She’d come to understand, in a baffled, muffled way, that she needed Jane as much as Jane needed her. Was this how other women felt about their kids? Was this what she, Nan, had missed, with her own child? And how, exactly, did you need them? What had the buffer of unlimited child care, the inescapable and (Be honest!) welcome parade of Nannies, deprived her of?

  But here was their stop.

  Nan went down the steps first, wind and rain like a cool palm laid against her face after the steamy closeness of the bus. Her legs ached; she was tired. She turned around to help Jane, who shook her head, then jumped with both feet down each of the bus steps and into the rubbishy torrent of the gutter. Water splashed over Nan. Soaked, shivering, she stumbled onto the curb.

  I’m too old for this—for all of it.

  |

  The following Monday, crossing the Quad (now briefly, falsely green and smelling of damp earth and tree bark), Nan felt a vague itchy feeling, recognizable as one she’d had often when she and Tod were living behind the Iron Curtain. The early-morning air was fizzy and tickling. City birds, misled by mildness, clotted the tops of the elms, their clicking and twittering amplified by the humid air. A gaggle of students came toward her, laughing, hatless and coatless.

  What she felt was followed. Tailed.

  She looked around for Val, could almost hear his “Fancy to meet you here!”

  There was someone. A figure that melted quickly into the long indigo shadow of a dormitory.

  Gabriel! Nan thought. Her heart slipped.

  She kept walking. Long-forgotten advice from the Iron Curtain edition of HOWDY filled her head. If you suspect you are being followed, keep moving; otherwise, your pursuer will know he has been spotted. She fumbled in her shoulder bag for her compact, thumbed it open. In the little round mirror she saw a man walking behind her. Dusty-looking brown leather jacket; dark cap pulled low over his forehead, shadowing his face; tall enough to be Gabriel. Walking faster, still looking into the mirror, she bumped into a boy with a Snugli strapped to his chest; inside was a tiny striped kitten. In the collision Nan dropped the mirror, heard it crack, had to let it lie.

  What should she do now? She hadn’t lost him.

  For the same reason, do not speed up; instead, take the first practical means of concealment that presents itself.

  She ducked into the stone archway under Faunce House. Sweat tickled her forehead, the cleft between her breasts. Breathing fast, she flattened herself against the glass of the long notice board and waited. Viewed from the shadows under the arch, the Quad in the bright morning light was like a stage set, and the noisy, laughing students were actors in a play about to begin. She watched, waiting for her pursuer to pass. A walk-on, she hoped. In her chest was the familiar feeling, not quite pain, as if a balloon were slowly expanding, pushing her ribs outward. Did she dare look for her pills? Where was he? Who was he? The sudden thought came to her, making her shiver, that Alex might in desperation have claimed that Nan had simply kidnapped Jane. Gabriel would come looking for them; Gabriel would not rest until he had his daughter back. Could he have found them so soon?

  If you cannot lose your pursuer by concealment, try to reverse direction.

  She eased along the glass notice board to the other end of the archway, then turned and went quickly, almost running now, down Waterman Street in the direction from which she’d come. Her open coat flapped around her. Her knees ached. Faster. The feeling in her chest intensified, but she kept moving, as if the balloon inside propelled her. When she turned, she saw him again. He seemed to be keeping a steady distance behind her.

  Up the steps and into Faunce House. Down a corridor, jostling students. Down a flight of steps. Basement, branching, three long halls lined with mailboxes. Choose!

  Pushing, stumbling, a little yappy dog, more students. Smell of winter bodies: onions and wet wool. Talking, shouting, rap music on someone’s boom box. Breathe. Move.

  The narrow corridor turned, and she turned with it. Find a ladies’ room! He couldn’t follow her there. The balloon, bigger now, urged her forward.

  Dead end. Empty. No students; no one.

  Frantic, breathless, Nan scanned the walls of mailboxes for an opening, a doorway. When, finally, she turned back the way she’d come, there he was.

  “Mrs. Tice?”

  Suddenly, her chest widening, she was dizzy. Her head felt like a bowling ball on the thin stem of her neck. The man put one hand under her elbow. Stumbling backward, she slid down a row of mailboxes to the floor. She fumbled in her purse, grasped the little plastic vial. She couldn’t open it.

  He took it from her and crouched down beside her.

  “One? Two?”

  She managed to shake her head.

  “One, then.”

  His voice seemed far away. Without looking at him, she took the pill and put it under her tongue. She leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes. The knobs of several mailboxes bit into her spine. The nitro began to work. Her breath slowed. The pressure inside her began to ease, the balloon slowly deflating. Her head stilled.

  |

  They sat at one of the tippy little tables in the student café at the top of Faunce House. Sunlight fell across them in long, calming stripes. At the next table a young man sat cracking his knuckles, a bright sound in the morning quiet, while he read the newspaper. Walker Tice, pulling off his black wool hat, revealed a bald head as perfectly shaped as a darning egg. Here he was—the Aged Cousin, in the flesh. Nan searched his face for some resemblance to Deenie, but in vain. As Deenie herself would have said, he wasn’t young, and he wasn’t pretty. Older than Deenie: late sixties, at a guess. His neck fell in a pale wattle from chin to clavicle; he took no pains to hide it. Instead he wore, tucked neatly into faded jeans, a black T-shirt with white Gothic lettering that said, OLD AGE AND TREACHERY WILL OVERCOME YOUTH AND SKILL. He was slender and fit (which was probably how he’d managed to keep up with her—all right, to catch her) and so clean Nan decided he must be a retired dentist.

  He seemed kind. He’d seated her in a quiet corner overlooking the Quad, brought her a large coffee, carefully sugared. But it was more than his kindness. She felt at ease with him: there was something about him that was familiar. Orange-scented steam from his tea, spiraling up between them, made her think suddenly of Morocco, where she and Tod had spent a belated honeymoon.

  He hadn’t meant to scare her, Walker Tice said, apologizing for the third time. He had been following her, but only to make her acquaintance. Val Peshkov had pointed her out to him that morning as she and … her daughter, was it? … left the building on Elbow Street, where he, Walker, had stopped by to collect the keys to his cousin’s place. He’d been just too late to catch her. Nan, relax
ing now, felt silly. The chase, which had seemed so long, had lasted only a few minutes. But she’d been terrified. Had living on the run, in hiding, already changed her into someone fearful, someone easily thrown?

  The hell with that, she thought. She could take care of herself. Intrepid had been Pop’s word for her from the time she was ten. Intrepid, he used to say, like your grandma. Nan’s contempt for the others—the ones who allowed fear to cheat them of experience, of life—she’d never let Pop, never let anyone but Deenie, see. Courage was the quality she’d valued most in Tod. She’d loved him for the very thing that let him stay untouched by her.

  “—left me her apartment,” Walker Tice was saying. “Her condo, I mean. We weren’t that close, but the thing is, everybody else is dead.”

  Nan nodded encouragingly.

  “It was just gonna be till this will thing gets straightened out. But I like it here. After ten years in Blue Hill, Providence feels like the big city. I don’t have any ties up in Maine anymore. So I might just—But you don’t want to hear all this.”

  He’d turned rosy above the wattle, charmingly abashed. Nan saw that he was not immune to her. And how lovely it was, basking in male regard after such a long time without. Not quite admitting to herself that she was flirting, Nan made little sounds of encouragement. He told her more. Revealed himself as retired—though when Nan asked from what, he appeared not to hear the question. He’d been widowed “a good few years.” When he asked about Nan’s deceased husband, she murmured something vague, the Missouri branch of the family, third cousins on Deenie’s father’s side. A tangled web, indeed. Walker Tice’s very certain, very blue eyes looked as if they would miss nothing; but he seemed satisfied. As he listened—Tice rhymes with Nice, Deenie used to say—Nan thought, Harmless? Better than harmless: he can be used. She’d tried, that first week in Providence, to go back to Deenie’s, but Val had claimed he’d mailed the keys to the cousin in Maine.

  “Anyway, all I seem to do up there’s go to funerals. You want some more coffee?”

  Nan shook her head. “No, but thanks.”

  The little café, nearly empty when they came in, had begun to fill with students, backpacks flapping, a few professorial types recognizable by their dusty duffle coats (men) and trench coats with trailing belts (women). Above the silky sound of newspapers turning, the clink of spoons on china, Walker confided, “Birds—that’s my passion. That’s why I stayed up north after Christy passed on. Your lesser-known birds don’t congregate in cities. You don’t have the flora, you don’t get the fauna.”

  A family obsession? Nan thought of the cages in Deenie’s living room. Why was he telling her all this? Tod used to warn her that people rarely said what they intended to say, let alone what they meant. Walker Tice sounded like a real ornithologist—but how would she know? Like the Last Lover when he spoke of volcanos, Walker, talking on about birds, gathered force and became at once vibrant and didactic. Words Nan hadn’t the dimmest apprehension of—species-specific aberration, avocets, lamellae—glimmered in the space between them. He was especially interested in cranes. Siberian cranes, Inca terns, blue-billed African somethings.

  “You sound like you’ve traveled a lot. What was it you said you did? Before you retired?”

  “Little of this, little of that. Engineering, mostly.”

  So he didn’t want to talk about his work. Unusual man! But why not? This kind, concerned man—could his profession be private detective? HOWDY: Appearances CAN be deceiving! Be most on guard when everything seems completely normal. But his connection with Deenie—surely that couldn’t be faked.

  Test him. Ask him something about her.

  Nan rummaged in her purse for her Marlboros, taking her time, sifting through old crumbled tobacco and shredded Kleenex and an abandoned lollipop of Jane’s. Then it came to her. Something Deenie’d told Nan and Nan alone, in those heady early days when each of them had arrived at the blessed realization that she’d found someone she could admit things to. She pulled out the mashed half-empty pack of cigarettes and a pack of matches.

  “So,” she said, as casually as she could, “it sounds like you managed to escape the family curse. Deenie used to talk about it. She used to say … What was it you all called it?”

  Walker reached across the table and took the matches. His hand, when it grazed hers, was cool, with clean, smooth nails. Without the least hurry he lit one of the matches and held it to the tip of her cigarette.

  “The Blood of the Elk,” he said, his tone equally casual. But his eyes met hers, and stayed there.

  She looked down at the flame held steadily toward her, sucked in, let the smoke stream out through her nostrils. The Blood of the Elk. Unless he was on the up-and-up, he couldn’t possibly have known. And besides, there was the mysterious sense of ease that she felt with him.

  “Damn!” Walker gave an abrupt shake of his hand. The match, which he’d neglected to blow out while looking so intently at Nan, had burned his fingers. She hadn’t had this kind of effect in years.

  A scrubbed young man in a ponytail came over to point out the NO SMOKING sign. Walker rose—he was taller than she’d realized, a head taller than the young man—and took him by the arm and walked him between the tables to the entrance, where they stood talking for a few seconds. Then, ponytail flapping, the young man vanished down the stairs.

  “What did you say to him?” Nan asked when Walker returned to their table. Smoke from her abandoned cigarette rose between them. She dropped it into the remains of her coffee.

  “I told him smoking bans are unconstitutional.”

  “But why did he take off like that?”

  “I told him I was the dean of the faculty and you were a lawyer for the ACLU.”

  Nan laughed; then Walker did, too. They couldn’t seem to stop. She tried to, looked at Walker through the tears in her eyes, and that set her off again. Pent-up tension from the chase through the catacombs of Faunce House, she would tell herself later; latent hysteria. But at that moment, laughing, she felt only a sudden lightness—an ascension—as if the two of them, she and this stranger, were borne aloft on some mysterious current of air, above the bowed heads of the other patrons, up through the magically yawning roof of Faunce House.

  Six

  In mid-January the cold returned, snapping down on Providence like a glass bell. Nan had forgotten, during the years in Seattle, the brilliance of sunshine in a world of snow, the light without warmth, the cold that colonized your bones. She invaded her shrinking store of cash to buy herself a warmer coat at the winter sales.

  January 21 found her once again in front of one of the Rock’s computers, watching the Pee-Eye unfurl. EIGHTH-GRADE STUDENTS IN LOVE SUICIDE; EGG-SWAPPING AT BIRTH CLINIC; GIRL, 14, SHOOTS FATHER. Alex’s message appeared immediately beneath an ad for WIFE-IN-LAW (“Your ex-husband married her. Your present husband divorced her. Better read this!”); Nan had scrolled past it before she realized. Her heart bumped and restarted. She fumbled with the mouse, lost the cursor, backed up.

  POOKIE: Not yet. Minor snags. Kiss her for me. HIPPIE

  Nan begged a pencil and a piece of paper from the boy next to her and copied out the message with a shaking hand.

  Outside the library, in the bright blustery morning, she walked and walked. At last she sat down in the noon sun on the stone lip of Bajnotti Fountain, feet dangling over into emptiness, and unfolded the piece of paper. She reread it without putting on her glasses since by now she knew it by heart. Looking up at the empty fountain, the stilled mouths of Neptune and his mermaids filled with deep bruise-colored shadows instead of water, she remembered a phrase from the Baltimore Catechism, chanted aloud year after year in catechism class. The sins against HOPE are PreSUMPtion and DeSPAIR.

  She lit a cigarette and, throwing her head back, let the fragrant, stinging smoke stream out of her nostrils into the milky air. She could no longer close her mind to the thought that Alex, once (still?) so much in love with her husband, might have been too
weak to leave him as she’d planned. Anger and helplessness knotted in a hard lump just under her diaphragm. Should she phone Alex? Demand to know what was happening, when she and Jane could come home? But calling was dangerous, could lead to discovery. More important, she had promised not to. All the broken promises in the past she could do nothing now to mend; but this one—

  The wind tugged at the piece of paper in her hand. She thought, I will take Alex’s message to mean exactly what it said. Not yet: soon, just not now. Minor snags: those could be anything. Bogle and Grant (best lawyers in the state of Washington) might have had a full calendar for custody hearings this month, for instance; or there could be some redtape formalities with family court. Nan would not let the cool tone or the cryptic brevity of Alex’s message worry her. Hadn’t they agreed that her messages should be brief and vague? She, Nan, could wait. It wasn’t so hard, now: there were Val and Mel, strangers turned friends; there was Mikki. The five hours a day Jane spent at day care restored Nan and gave her back some of the joy of grandmotherhood. She could wait.

  Nan felt something pressing into her thigh. She looked down. A child’s chin rested just above her wool-clad knees. It was the toddler from Mikki’s day care. Nan twisted around, looking for his mother. There was no one in sight but a young black boy in a green Celtics jacket, kicking at the ornamented rim of the fountain, his eyes on Nan and the child. Suddenly the wind gave a ferocious tug on the scrap of paper and, gloved hands clumsy, she lost her hold on it. It soared out over the fountain and spiraled away. The child, watching, laughed in delight. He caught his lower lip between teeth as small as rosary beads and gazed up at her.

  Nan had saved a life once. Probably saved it. At the time she didn’t think of it in those terms at all: more like putting something back where it belonged. She and Tod were driving their little two-cylinder Polski Fiat back to Warsaw from Zakopane, where they’d spent Christmas in the Tatra Mountains. They were on the highway north of Sosnowiec. Twilight burned in the flat, snowy fields on either side, turning them to smoke and lavender, softening the black bare-as-crucifixes trees that punctured the horizon. Up ahead, at the side of the road, was a small smudged figure. Drawing level with it, they saw that it was not, as Tod had guessed, one of the stray dogs that roamed the roads, but a child. Very young, in a padded jacket too big for it, tangled yellow hair glowing in the car’s headlights. Of course they stopped. In the crowded front seat, the little girl, placed on Nan’s lap, turned on her a look of pure terror. Slowly, almost formally, she bent her head to the tender skin of Nan’s wrist between her glove and the sleeve of her sheepskin coat. Her teeth sank in. They took her to the Politsia in the next village, and when they got back to Warsaw Nan got a tetanus shot from the British doctor. “No good deed goes unpunished,” he said, his whiskey-scented breath warming her ear. For weeks the flesh of her inner wrist had borne a slowly fading crescent of red. Tod had tried, but he was never able to find out what became of the child. Officially she had never, it seemed, existed.