The Year She Disappeared

by Ann Harleman

  Wind wrapped itself around Nan like cold bedsheets, pressed an icy pillow to her face. She looked down at the little boy clutching her pant leg. A triangle of mucus gleamed on his upper lip.

  “Hey, sweetie,” she began, but his small face broke suddenly into radiance, his eyes on something behind her.

  She turned. It was the black boy in the Celtics jacket.

  “Hey, Bug!” he said to the child. “You buggin’ this lady?” He held out his arms. The little boy, already scrambling around Nan, leapt at him, climbed his blue-jeaned legs. The older boy was even less warmly dressed, in a thin nylon jacket and sneakers. He picked up the child and Nan saw that the two of them had the same head of tight, shiny black curls. They came closer, and Nan could smell an oddly chemical smell, like ether, like the glue Tod had used for his ship models. Above them the bare branches of a sycamore sparred in the bitter wind.

  “It’s getting colder,” Nan said. “You ought to take your brother home now.”

  “Brother? This my son.” The older boy gave the child a shake. “Ain’t you, Buggy-Bug? Deciolaria, that’s his mama, she got busted. He love it here, it is his hard-core place.”

  “His nose is running.”

  “Not the safest spot, though. That’s what I come over to tell you. I seen you here before, you and your little girl. You gotta be, like, cautious around this area. Last week some dumb-ass kid, Fatmir Somethin’, he got slashed right here. Sliced his hand right off. And that’s with two cop cars doin’ a sixty-nine a block away.”

  “Here,” Nan said. “Here’s a Kleenex.”

  The boy ignored her outstretched hand. Bug was struggling to get down. “He think he rule you. You know? Deciolaria gonna have her hands full when she gets outta the ACI. He gonna humble her ass.” Bug’s flailing feet connected with the boy-father’s groin. “Fuck!” Then, shouting over Bug’s joyous squeals, “Deciolaria got no idea!”

  They went off, the small boy wrapped around the big one. Nan watched them cross the snowy plaza beyond the fountain and vanish around the corner of the Upchurch Building, filled with a sense of loss she could not explain.

  The wind blew all that night and all the next day and night, recalling the wind in Warsaw in January, filling the loft with its steady, disquieting fervor. Both nights Jane woke, long after midnight, screaming, “Mama! Mama!” Nan held her small, warm, quaking body. Nightmares, she remembered, were one of the Seven Signs of the Abused Child. Looking out at the night sky through the No-Theft grille that guarded all of Nibbrig’s windows, she sang the non-lullabies she’d sung to Jane since babyhood. “Zombie Jamboree,” “Salty Dog,” “Hernando’s Hideaway.” The nearly full moon threw over them a shawl of light patterned with skewed diamonds from the window grille. Just when Nan thought she’d fallen sleep, Jane said, “Nana!” with the special note she used for questions other grown-ups had refused to answer, the note that recalled their pact, Nan’s and Jane’s, that Nan would never lie.

  “What, Grape Eyes?”

  “Did you know that all animals and people die?”

  “Yes. That’s true.”

  “So you’re gonna die?”

  Nan hesitated, then said, “Yes.”

  “Well, doesn’t that worry you?”

  Nan bit back a laugh. “No, Sweetpea. Because it won’t happen for a long, long time. You’ll be all grown up.”

  Jane gave a satisfied sigh—children, Nan believed, always knew the truth when they heard it—and wriggled closer to lay her head on Nan’s chest. Nan’s arms, tired from a day’s worth of lifting, holding, wiping, fastening, ached with her weight. She said, very softly, “You miss your mama, don’t you, Sweetpea?”

  Jane’s head, nose in Nan’s armpit, moved slightly. A nod?

  “She misses you, too. She doesn’t want to be away from you, but she has to. Did she tell you that?”

  The small body, humid with sleep, stiffened. “Secret,” Jane murmured.

  “It’s just temporary. Just for a little while.”

  The hard little nose burrowed deeper into Nan’s armpit. “We don’t tell. Secrets. Ever.” A small expiring breath. Then sleep.

  Zipper leapt onto the bed and curled in the curve of Jane’s belly. Nan thought of the little boy at Bajnotti Fountain—the radiance in his face when he looked at the older boy who was his father. She rubbed her cheek across the top of Jane’s head, feeling the silky dampness of her hair.

  |

  When Walker put up the shades, dust shot out, peppering them both. “Good Christ! Afraid I’m not much of a housekeeper.”

  Nan was relieved to hear it. She found his cleanness, which had held steady through three meetings now, unnerving. The Last Lover had been unfastidious—generally, if she heeded her instincts, a good omen for sex. But why was she even thinking about that now? The sex chapter of her life was closed.

  From Deenie’s—now Walker’s—windows, the sky above the State House was pale and paved with small thick clouds like cobblestones. The weather had turned cold again. The late-afternoon air outside, as they’d walked down Benefit Street, had tasted of iron. It had taken almost no effort to get herself invited to Deenie’s apartment. But how, Nan wondered, could she broach the subject of Deenie’s death?

  “Christy, the way she was, it made it impossible. Housekeeping, I mean.” Walker seemed intent on completing the portrait of his dead wife begun earlier on their walk. “She liked to walk the two miles to Stop and Shop and bring home a grocery cart. One time—this was way before she died—I came back from a couple weeks in Nairobi and there were five of them in the living room. Christy looked around and said, ‘Hon, would you take me home?’ I had to tell her, You are home. She wouldn’t believe me. All those carts around, it had to be the Stop and Shop. Stubborn?” His voice grew fond. “Why, if she’d drowned in the Kennebec, I’d’ve looked for the body upstream of where she fell in.”

  They stood side by side gazing out through the dirty windows. In Seattle this would have qualified as a territorial view. Alex and Gabriel, in the six years of their marriage, had progressed from no view to territorial view to a view of the water. Nan started to tell Walker this, then remembered she was supposed to be from Missouri. She looked out at the dome of the State House, like a huge egg in an eggcup. Hadn’t she promised herself, for the sake of security, to keep her two lives separate, her then and her now?

  “Any rate.” Walker clapped dust off his hands and turned away. The scolding of Deenie’s birds was like a dozen tiny hacksaws. “Any rate, life with Christy was never dull. Why, if she saw a heavyset guy on the street, she’d go right up to him and smile and say, ‘Aren’t we fat?’” He chuckled bleakly.

  Poor man. Was he uxorious, or just compelled to put a cheerful face on things? Nan watched while he quieted Deenie’s birds, stopping at each cage in turn. No pity, she reminded herself; pity is dangerous. This man was concealing something—that had been clear from their very first meeting—no matter how many fond marital stories he told. In fact, the very smoothness of his stories, the ease with which they unreeled, was something her Foreign Service years had taught her to recognize as a sign of concealment.

  Walker offered wine, which Nan refused in favor of green tea. He went into the kitchen—Deenie’s kitchen—and Nan sat down on the sofa. She could see him puttering comfortably among her dead friend’s crockery. The long leather strip of sleigh bells, Deenie’s great-grandfather’s, hung beside the refrigerator just as they had in Deenie’s kitchen in Chicago. Walker paused to give them a playful tug. Deenie used to jingle them when either of them said anything she thought was bullshit.

  “Smoke if you like,” he said, coming back from the kitchen with a gently steaming mug in the shape of a flamingo, its long, inquiring pink neck the handle, which he placed on the low table in front of the sofa. Deenie’s favorite mug. Walker settled beside her with a bottle of ale. Eyes on the bright, implausible pink of the flamingo’s plumage, blinking back unexpected tears, Nan found she didn’t want a cigarette afte
r all.

  “So, listen.” Walker pulled a sheaf of papers off the coffee table and began flipping through them. “You said you’d help. Most of these people I’ve already found, or the lawyers have. Or they found the lawyers, more like. People can be pretty quick about wills. But there are two left, nobody seems to know who they are. Peter Yerkes. Annette Boyce Mulholland. You know either of them?”

  Nan felt the blood leave her face at the sound of her name, unheard for weeks. There was a pounding in her temples. MulHOLland. MulHOLland. One TWO three.

  “No,” she said faintly. She picked up her mug to take a sip of tea, but her hand shook so badly that she had to put it down again. She stroked the flamingo’s bowed head with her thumb. She felt Walker looking at her, composed her face, and turned to him.

  “I’m sorry. Those names aren’t familiar at all.”

  “Your husband never mentioned them? Either of them?”

  “Not that I remember.” Nan fought the urge to get up and walk past her host into the kitchen and pull on the worn leather strap, hard, until the bright sound of sleigh bells filled the apartment. She gave him a smile—Dazzler No. 5, Deenie used to call it. “I wish I could help.”

  Do I dare ask what Deenie left this Annette Boyce Mulholland?

  She looked over Walker’s arm, but without her glasses the long, curling sheets might as well have been Sanskrit.

  “Can I use your bathroom?” Would you use it, so I can get a look at that will?

  “Sure. It’s the second door on your right.”

  Good thing he said that. She’d have betrayed her knowledge of the apartment by going straight to it.

  The little bathroom smelled bracingly of toothpaste and shoe polish. Sitting on the toilet where Val had treated her injured knee all those weeks ago, she wondered, Did he tell Walker about finding me here? If so, why hadn’t Walker mentioned it? Was he suspicious of Nan?

  A penciled yellow Post-it note on the medicine cabinet said, “It’s not the heat—it’s the stupidity.” She opened the door and checked its contents. Halcyon with Deenie’s name on the prescription label; for Walker, blood pressure medication (the same as Tod’s) and, aha!, Viagra. She closed the door and fluffed her hair in the mirror, trying in vain to make the spaniel ears lift back from her cheeks. Did Walker believe her story? That was the question. Because her story was becoming more and more complicated.

  Always tell the truth, Dorothea used to say. It’s so much easier to keep your story straight.

  With Tod Nan had always tried not to lie outright—just refrain from specifying. Of course, she’d had Tod’s willing collusion. He’d wanted so deeply not to know about the lovers.

  On her way back to the living room she passed the bedroom door. She eased it open a crack and peered in. No metal box on top of the wardrobe—or anywhere in sight.

  “Thing is,” Walker said, when she returned to the living room, “do you like movies?”

  “Yes.”

  “What kind? I mean, do you mind if they have subtitles?”

  Mind? Oh, of course—Christy. Nan imagined homey scotch-plaid aprons with oven mitts to match. “No,” she said. “I like them.”

  There was, it transpired, such a film at the Avon Cinema on Thayer Street, on Saturday. Would she (this came out in an endearing rush) do him the honor?

  Yes, she said, provided Val and Mel could babysit. Walker looked so pleased that, over a second cup of tea—having waited a few minutes to blur any feeling of quid pro quo—she nerved herself to ask, almost casually, “What did Cousin Geraldine die of?”

  Walker set down his bottle carefully on the coffee table, then sat looking at it. BLIND FAITH ALE, said the label in letters arching over the head of a blue moose.

  “AIDS,” he said finally. “She died of AIDS”

  “AIDS?”

  “I know. People our age.”

  “But— Why didn’t she—” She stopped. From Walker’s point of view there would have been no reason for Deenie to tell Nan.

  “She never told me,” Walker said heavily. He stared out through the filmy windows at the darkening winter sky. “That must’ve been why she moved to Providence—nobody knew her. She made me promise not to tell a soul she was here. Wouldn’t say why. I didn’t know she was sick until after she was dead. When they told me, I just lay up there in Augusta, in the hospital—it was right after my hernia—feeling like shit because she didn’t trust me enough to tell me.”

  “Oh,” Nan said, and in comforting Walker comforted herself, “oh, no! It wouldn’t’ve been that. Probably it was to, to save you. She felt—might’ve felt, must’ve felt—why make people you love suffer along with you?”

  Walker looked skeptical.

  “Besides, if you didn’t know, that made it easier for her to forget about it. When she was with you, or talking to you. So, you see, you did help her. By not knowing.”

  Oh, Mother! (Alex’s voice) I swear you can rationalize anything. But Walker brightened. Watching him turn toward her, a plant seeking sun, she understood that this was something he’d needed, probably for a long time. Conversations with a Soft Woman, as Darwin put it in his journal, totting up the reasons to marry. Before this could make her warm to him, Nan rose, brushing imaginary lint from her gray wool pants. Outside the tall windows, evening had set in. The pale lights of houses and cars pricked holes in the deepening darkness.

  “I have to go. Mel’ll have picked up Jane by now.” Then, because she wanted to come back, look for the metal box, find out about her legacy, she added, “I’ll think about it. Those people you mentioned. Maybe something will occur to me.”

  “Great! Now you’re cookin’ with gas!”

  As he helped her on with her coat, deftly steering the sleeves over her arms, a smell came to her, familiar but elusive, suddenly strong in the close air of the foyer. It wasn’t until she was out on the street in the cold blue dusk—she insisted on walking to the bus stop by herself, and Walker reluctantly gave in—that she recognized it. The mingled smell of mildew and mothballs. A musty, old man smell.

  |

  On February 7 there was another message from Alex.

  POOKIE: In temporary possession of our treasure. See you soon. HIPPIE

  Temporary possession—that must mean custody? Possessory rights, which meant that Alex could send Jane wherever she wanted, which meant Gabe wouldn’t be able to bring a charge of kidnapping against Nan? The most he could do would be to petition the court for visitation.

  Relief flooded through her. She had to lean back in her chair and put her hands on the edge of the table for balance. This was the first unambiguously positive message. Yet Nan found, to her surprise, that she did not feel unambiguously glad. Seeing Alex soon meant handing over Jane, meant the end of this strange, scary, cobbled-together life in Providence. A good thing, surely? Then why this odd tickle of loss? She lifted her eyes from the glowing screen and looked around at the diligently scrolling students, as if their hunched forms might provide an answer. Outside, against the long windows, snow swirled upward, fine and dry as smoke.

  |

  “Some blunt?” Mel passed the end of the joint to Nan, who thought, Oh, why not? She took a deep toke, held it prickling in her chest, then slowly let it go.

  “It’s great, huh?” Mel giggled. “Really dope dope.”

  Nan passed the pinched remains to Val, who burned his fingers as he inhaled. “Chort!” The word came out in a ragged puff of smoke. Mel began to roll a fresh joint, bent lovingly over her task. Her neon-green forelock fell across her face and she kept stopping to brush it back.

  All three sat shoeless and cross-legged on the floor of Val and Mel’s loft. Behind the painted screen at the far end of the room, Jane slept in Val and Mel’s bed. Around them were strewn the remains of their dinner, takeout from the Thai restaurant on Federal Hill. They were celebrating Mel’s good luck—a gig as tattoo consultant for a documentary on South County bikers—with stuff much more potent than the last Nan could remember
having—when was it?—oh, nearly three years ago, with the Last Lover. A celebration for Mel; for Nan, an escape.

  Val passed the lemongrass chicken one more time, then the pad thai, urging, “Treat yourself!”

  Nan shook her head, which felt deliciously light. The floor, which had seemed so unyielding when they all sat down—she’d disdained the cushion offered by Mel—began to soften. The light from the rosyshaded lamp grew pinker and more tender.

  Val cut open the pomegranates Nan had brought for dessert. (What they were doing in the Food Basket, she couldn’t imagine; she’d felt, that afternoon, as if she were rescuing them.) Their bright many-chambered hearts always made her think of desire; they were what desire would be if it were—what was the word? The fresh joint came to her and she took a long, reckless puff. Incarnate—that was it. The sumptuous seeded flesh of the pomegranate glowed incarnate on her tongue. Persephone brought pomegranates back from the Underworld. Persephone was the daughter of … Nope, can’t remember. Alex is my daughter. Nan felt herself becoming lighter and lighter; her head felt borrowed. At last she understood everything. She said, “Alex is in the Underworld. The Nannies have stolen her.”