The Year She Disappeared

by Ann Harleman

  Then suddenly someone was shaking her. “Nan. Nan! Wake up!”

  Nan opened her eyes. How had she come to be lying down with a blanket over her and a pillow beneath her head? She threw off the blanket, which itched, and sat up.

  “You were dreaming,” Mel said. “Here. This one’s yours.” She handed Nan a crisp little yellow pod. Examining it dutifully, she recognized a fortune cookie. She looked around. The joint and the ashtray had disappeared. Someone had opened a window, and a cold stream of air hit her, clearing her head, at least a little.

  Mel snapped her pod in two and pulled out a strip of paper. “‘Now is the time to try something new.’” She looked appealingly at Val, who was studying the toe of his sock.

  “You go,” Mel told Nan.

  Obediently Nan cracked open her cookie. Without her glasses the tiny purple words might as well have been mouse tracks. Mel took it from her and read, “‘Imagination is more important than knowledge.’”

  Val spread his fortune out on his knee. “‘You are never selfish with your advice.’ This, I believe to belong with Melochka.” He handed it to her, laughing.

  Mel flung herself backward so that her head hit the floor with a thump that made Nan wince. She lay on her back with her legs still crossed and closed her eyes. “Blunted. Blurred. Baked,” she crooned.

  Nan remembered what she’d been meaning to ask Val, and did. Had he told Walker he’d found Nan in Deenie’s apartment?

  No. It had not seemed need to say.

  “I’d rather he didn’t know,” Nan said.

  Val nodded, unsurprised. “The world is narrow,” he said, in a quoting voice. Another Russian proverb?

  Mel said, opening her eyes, “So how about it, Nan? Next week, when I get back from South County, we do you over.”

  “Oh, I don’t think …”

  The dark eyes, shiny as coal, studied her. “You a wuss, or what? I dare you!”

  Dare you! Deenie used to say. The frog in Sister Emmanuel’s desk drawer; their first cigarettes, out in back of the gym; going to the upper school mixer at Christian Brothers without any underwear. Nan, always trying to measure up to older, faster, smarter Deenie, could never resist. Now is the time to try something new.

  “Deenie died of AIDS,” Nan said. Her tone, under the emboldening influence of marijuana, was unintentionally accusing.

  Mel, not meeting Nan’s eyes, said, “We promised Mrs. Horsfal we wouldn’t tell.”

  She looked so unhappy that Nan couldn’t bring herself to pursue the subject. What did it matter now? Deenie was dead. Val and Mel had honored her wishes; she, Nan, would do the same.

  “I’ve got to go,” she said. “See you tomorrow?”

  Val went and gathered up the sleeping Jane, to carry her downstairs. When Nan turned to say good night, she surprised Mel in the doorway, looking after Jane with that hungry half-wistful expression on her face.

  |

  How did you get it, Deen? For love? For sex? Or could it have been drugs? Was it (could it, could anything be) worth it? Or did its value lie in this: that it flung you up against the last dare, the one nobody is allowed to refuse?

  Why didn’t you tell me?

  |

  Despite the cold, which deepened all through February, Nan found herself walking the city with Deenie’s cousin. It softened the isolation of life alone with a young child. She dropped Jane off at Mikki’s every morning at ten. The minute they entered, Jane would sit down happily on the floor and struggle with her red rubber boots, the light from Mikki’s rice-paper globe gilding her bent head. “Gospodi!” she’d mutter to herself, one of Val’s lesser oaths (“Oh, Lord,” according to Mel, was the equivalent). Finally she’d let Nan come and kneel beside her and tug on the bottom of each boot until it released the foot inside. When they were done, Jane would pull off her anklets as well—“Because bears don’t wear socks,” she said once, incomprehensibly—and run into the playroom to join the other children. Letting herself out through Mikki’s front door, Nan could hear her laughing, that husky laugh deeper and longer than the laughter of the others. (Barefoot… bear foot, Nan realized, making her way down the stairs; and then, Why doesn’t she ever laugh like that with me anymore?

  Sometimes they walked in the late morning, after Nan’s stint at the Rock, fortified with sandwiches made by Walker, or chocolate and oranges. Walker was a tireless and, she had to admit, interesting companion. What he liked was to read, then put his newly acquired information to use—a true autodidact. So they walked along Benefit Street from one end to the other, with Walker pointing out the first Baptist church ever built in America, the Jeremiah Tillinghast house, the Caleb Ormsbee house, the Providence Athenaeum (where Edgar Allan Poe fell in love). They walked all over the East Side, while Walker lectured on Providence as a haven for maverick architects through the centuries and pointed out dadoes, mansard roofs, a corbeled arch. They saw the spot on Summit Avenue where Lafayette’s men camped during the Revolutionary War, the spot along the river where Roger Williams first stepped ashore, the spot on Prospect Terrace where he was buried. Not unexpectedly, Walker knew many facts—such as that the balding marble dome of the State House was the seventh-largest unsupported dome in the world—that Nan could happily have lived in ignorance of. Their walks often ended along the canal-like ribbon of the Providence River. Walker liked watching the progress of the construction and savored the absurdity of paving and then unpaving a river. He speculated about where the money had come from for so frivolous an undertaking. Did the Mafia (Providence, he informed Nan, was their farm team) require it, for some nefarious reason of their own? Nan told him what her cabbie had said, the night she arrived in Providence: the Venice of the Northeast. Maybe that was it, Walker mused. Nostalgia for the Old Country.

  Sometimes they walked in the afternoon, picking up Jane at Mikki’s and striding down Hope Street in the swiftly falling dusk. Jane, who liked Walker almost as much as she liked Val (like the little girls in the case histories Nan unearthed at the Rock, she preferred men, was almost vampy around them), would trot along uncomplainingly for a mile or more, then ask to be hoisted to his shoulders. She rode with her head at a queenly slant, tossing her mane of hair and chanting words that Val had taught her. Sobachka! Byelka! Walker brought along some poster paints, and on the slope above the university playing field they made snow paintings, pouring out the shiny red and yellow and blue, watching the three streams course across the smooth snow, merging and changing, producing now orange, now green, now purple. Another time they rented skates and Val drove them to Barrington Beach and they skated, all four of them, on the ice-coated sand.

  Gradually it became clear to Nan that she felt better than she had in years. Without admitting to herself that Walker’s disapproval had anything to do with it, she cut down to two cigarettes a day. Her lungs no longer protested the stairs to the third-floor loft. A good thing, because of course she and Jane had fallen into the great slough of the uninsured. No Medicare for the fictitious Nan Tice; no way to use Jane’s Blue Cross without becoming traceable.

  The thought of a romantic, or even an erotic, agenda behind their walks occurred to her. She couldn’t afford it, she told herself; she wasn’t interested. If Walker was, that would have to be his own private joy and sorrow. Alex would have accused Nan of using him. If so, he was clearly happy to be used.

  |

  February 21. No message from Alex.

  Beyond the cool blue glow of the computer screen everything seemed to flicker and grow dim: the high overhead lights, the morning sun slanting through the long windows, the students quietly clicking away. Fear made Nan’s fingers tremble on the keys as she scrolled fruitlessly back and forth. What on earth was happening back home? She searched through the rest of the paper for some clue, something that might explain Alex’s silence. BARRINGTON GIRL MISSING; or something worse. WIFE OF PROMINENT SURGEON DISAPPEARS. Oh, stop! Nan thought. Stop! She must have spoken out loud, because Ben Kingsley hastened around the I
nformation Desk and started toward her, looking alarmed. She grabbed her parka off the back of her chair and ran.

  That afternoon, on their usual walk, Jane lost her spacer—the tiny false tooth, attached to a pink plastic palate hooking onto the teeth on either side, that replaced a front tooth dislodged in a fall the summer before. The three of them retraced their steps, scanning the icy sidewalk and the graying snow along its edges. Nan could see Jane’s tongue exploring the delightful new emptiness behind her upper lip. “Nyet,” she murmured to herself. “Not yet.” White on white: it was hopeless.

  When they’d gone all the way back to the river, Nan sat down on one of the benches placed to give a view of the construction. Jane came and stood with her hand on Nan’s knee, rubbing her forehead with two fingers, Alex’s gesture. “Are you so tired, Nana?” Those green, green eyes fixed on Nan’s, sure of a welcome. But Nan, hating her own meanness, said, “Why couldn’t you be more careful?” and turned away.

  A backhoe idled on the esplanade below them, its bumper sticker in the cloudy winter light seeming to say BABIES KILLS until Nan made out, in smaller letters underneath, VACCINATE YOUR PET. How were they to get a replacement? Apart from the money, questions would be asked: how did so young a child come to lose a tooth? For all Nan knew, any dentist they saw would be obliged to report them to child welfare.

  Walker sat down beside her and put one arm around her slumped shoulders. He said, “She didn’t mean to lose it.”

  Nan pulled away. What did he know about it? It wasn’t his place to intervene.

  But she was ashamed of taking out her anxiety on Jane. No message this morning: what did it mean? Good: having gotten temporary custody, Alex was busy making arrangements to retrieve Jane—so busy she couldn’t find time to send a message. Bad: the custody decision had provoked Gabriel, made him angry and, maybe, reckless. What might he do, in that case?

  Nan shivered. If only she could talk to someone—Walker, for instance—about all this. Dorothea used to say, A joy shared is a joy doubled; a sorrow shared is a sorrow halved.

  As if to underscore Nan’s aloneness, Walker turned away to comfort Jane. “Hey,” he said, “you know what they say. You can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your nose.”

  Jane laughed. Pointedly detouring around Nan, she sat down next to Walker. The three of them sat there on the bench in the chill of approaching dusk and watched the construction workers. Walker and Jane were both infatuated with the machines that loomed like prehistoric creatures. One had a huge claw for picking things up: a long-necked brachiosaurus; another was squat with a sort of shovel-horn: a triceratops. (Jane knew her dinosaurs.) Above the sound of the machines came the mewing of seagulls, the only thing in Providence that reminded Nan of Seattle. It was strange to see them against the backdrop of city buildings, with no ocean in sight.

  As if reading her thoughts, Walker said, “They’re out of place, but they don’t know it. That’s the thing.”

  Nan watched them blurring the air—hundreds of them, their testy cries blending with the noise of the machines—above the bare black trees. Their bodies were the same gray-white as the capitol dome against the smoke-colored sky. For an instant Nan had the vertiginous illusion of a world without color. She looked down quickly at Jane’s scarlet parka.

  “There are seagulls over the Great Lakes now,” Walker said.

  “I’m not givin’ you CPR, buddy!” the dump-truck driver shouted to a welder standing too near the edge of the river. “Don’t even think about me givin’ you mouth-to-mouth!”

  Odd: usually there was so much noise here, along the river, that such an exchange would have been inaudible. Why had the machines stopped?

  Walker was complaining to Jane about his next-door neighbors, a couple from Michigan named Tulk. He insisted on referring to himself as a Michigander, which made her, Walker maintained, a Michigoose (giggles from Jane). He owned every power tool known to man, which even in the dead of winter she found some use for. “Seven thirty on a Sunday morning, they’re out there currying the sidewalk. A person can’t hear the birds!” Above the upturned collar of his pea jacket his wattle quivered with indignation.

  Nan said, “Look! Something’s happening.”

  There were now several workmen (or workwomen—it was hard to tell) standing on the ledge above the river. They were looking down into the water, studiously, not far from the spot where Nan had thrown in her cell phone. A blue rubber raft appeared, and three divers in wet suits slipped over the side into the water. Floodlights on either side of the narrow river snapped on. Nan fished her glasses out of her purse. The workers were joined by two meter maids who stood checking their watches. A small crowd began to collect around the bench where Walker and Nan and Jane sat. On the half-finished pedestrian bridge a little downstream a crane appeared. Someone inside flung down chains that hit the water with loud spanking sounds. The divers seized them and disappeared. Jane reached across Walker and grabbed Nan’s arm. She does need me! flashed through Nan as she put her gloved hand over Jane’s mittened one. A second boat appeared, a sort of wooden dory, filled with bright orange life preservers. One of the workmen, his yellow hard hat shining in the floodlit dusk, walked out along a rusting iron girder that served as a plank to the other side of the river; he was angrily waved back by the two policemen on the dory. There was a pause, while the crowd pressing, now, around Nan murmured and coughed and stamped booted feet on the snow-crusted ground. The aromatic fragrance of a cigar somewhere behind her made Nan think of Gabriel. She turned, heart pounding, to scan the crowd. He wasn’t there. Of course he wasn’t. As so often when she thought of him, the memory returned to her of Gabe on the night he’d told her about his mother’s death, Gabe shuddering with silent tears. Sad Gabriel. Moving, pitiable Gabriel. Could Alex hold out against that?

  Walker nudged her. “Look! They’ve found something”

  Divers’ black-sheathed heads, like vipers, broke the surface of the water one by one. The last one up made a sign with his arm, and the crane reared back. The heavy chains began to rise. The crowd fell silent. Nan could hear, above the steady grinding of the crane, water falling from the chains like garbled bells. The air seemed suddenly colder, and she shivered. At the bottom of the chains an automobile appeared, upside down, covered with black-green slime. In the light of the floodlights it looked like a car made of moss. Water poured off it as it was lifted clear.

  Walker was on his feet, hoisting Jane to his shoulders, holding both her hands in one of his while he held out the other to Nan. Half a dozen policemen were suddenly among the crowd, herding people up the snowy slope away from the water. Nan and Walker—with Jane protesting loudly, “What is it? I wanna see!”—turned to follow, their boots punching through the crust of snow.

  The ten o’clock news had some footage of the event, though Nan didn’t remember seeing any TV cameras. Jane, who should have been in bed, watched avidly for a glimpse of herself while a newscaster’s voice explained. The car had apparently gone into the river a year ago and had immediately been covered by the concrete poured for a temporary footbridge. Removal of the concrete, which had been going on all week, had revealed the presence of “something unexpected” in the water below. And inside the car? As Nan got up to turn it off, thinking, Jane mustn’t see this, her own image appeared on the screen.

  Jane yelled, “Nana!”

  Nan sat down again. She waited for the room to come to a stop. The camera lingered—not, she realized, interested in her but in the mayor, who stood behind her, bright-eyed beneath his toupee, looking like the cheerful gangster he was. He removed the cigar from his mouth and smiled.

  “Where’m I?” Jane cried. “They didn’t show me!”

  After several seconds Nan’s face gave way to footage of the car, right side up, the doors being pried open. Quickly she put her palm on Jane’s nape and pressed Jane’s face against her breasts. With her free hand she jabbed at the remote, but not before she’d seen, inside the dripping, algae
-covered car, the shadow of something human.

  |

  “You’re cherry!” Mel said. “I love that.”

  “What?”

  They were in the studio Mel shared with Val, Nan on a comfortably padded examining table, Mel on a wheeled stool. “You know—a tattoo virgin. I get a lot of them ‘cause I’m gentle. I have a reputation for that. Okay, what are we gonna do, and where are we gonna do it?”

  “I don’t know.” Why in the world had she agreed to this? “How about a heart with ‘Mother’ inside it?”

  “Sarcasm is the lowest form of irony, did you know that? Here. Look through this while I get things ready.”

  Today’s tattoo was the last step in Mel’s makeover of Nan, providing her with the new look that Channel 10 News had now made a necessity. Nan began leafing dutifully through Tattoo International. It was mostly color photographs of men and women, not all of them young, many of them nude. Tattoos occupied much larger portions of their bodies than Nan would have imagined: the length of an arm or a thigh; whole backs; two or three men in what at first looked like long-sleeved paisley bodysuits. Many of these people had pierced noses and/or eyebrows as well. Feeling queasy, Nan turned the pages faster. Archangels, demons, Indian chiefs; the head of Rasputin; nipples turned into flowers or stars. Mel assured her that whatever she liked could be duplicated on her, Nan’s, body. It was like sitting in a yarn shop paging through knitting pattern books, except for the feeling of seasickness.

  Mel slid the magazine gently out of Nan’s hands. “Some people, when they get the urge to hurt themselves—you know, like those teenage girls who cut their arms and legs with razor blades?—they get a tattoo instead.” Nan knew without being told that she was talking about herself, and felt a quick stitch of pity. “How about a small fleur-de-lis? Tasteful.”

  “A scorpion?” Nan suggested. “That’s my sign.”