The Year She Disappeared

by Ann Harleman

  In the dark living room, restless, unable to sleep, Nan settled on the sofa with a glass of brandy and a cigarette. Their separate smells rose up around her like the memories of home.

  Where was Alex right now? Nan imagined a furnished room on the wrong side of Capitol Hill. Moonless Seattle nights, Alex pacing in the stillness, corner to corner, her fingers interrogating the furniture as she passed, her eyes questioning her reflection in the dark windows. No—if she was hiding from Gabriel, she’d leave town. A cottage, then, on the Olympic Peninsula, damp and cold and out of season, the smell of fish and pine needles, the ocean gray with rain? Walks to the little store in La Push where a few Quillayeute Indians stared at her without interest. No; not there either. If Nan could imagine her there, so could Gabriel. Say she’d gone out of state, then. Or gone to Canada—that was better. Vancouver was only a two-hour drive from Seattle, and it was a city plenty big enough to get lost in. But where would Alex stay? How would she live? She had no friends there, no relatives—no one.

  Nan dragged on her cigarette, took another swallow of brandy. Alex would be—was—all alone. Like Nan herself—but wait. Nan had Jane. Watching Alex with Jane—that had been Nan’s belated introduction to the art of mothering. When had she ever stood yearning by Alex’s bed as she’d stood just now beside Jane’s?

  A shock of pain flashed through Nan’s fingers. Her cigarette, unregarded, had burned down to the filter. She dropped it onto the rug, which immediately began to smolder. Without thinking, she poured the last of her brandy over the spot. A bitter smell rose up. Sucking her burned fingers, too weary to get up and go into the kitchen and hold them under cold water, Nan sat on. Outside, the freeway traffic had ceased; inside, the dark and silence grew denser. The remote control for the new TV Walker had given her lay beside her on the sofa, where Jane had left it. She picked it up, flicked it on, found the eleven o’clock news.

  “A government-sponsored SEX RING has turned out to be DEADLY in the nation’s SMALLest state!” a joyful voice announced.

  And there on the screen, once again, were the shiny black-suited divers, the algae-covered car being pulled from the water, the mayor of Providence—and Nan.

  |

  Rat Woman clapped twice, her signal for a change of pose.

  Nan got off her tall stool and lay down on the platform, its pine planks warmed by the spotlights, in what she thought of as her Little Mermaid pose: knees, hips, elbows all comfortably deployed. Oh, she’d become brazen, all right (the nuns’ word, long ago: Catholic for chutzpah, Deenie used to say). Her breasts as she leaned on one elbow swung sideways, more like eggplants than pears; but her gym-enhanced stomach folded only once. For the first half of each evening, she tried to surprise the group, to challenge them. (In their training session Mel had quoted Robert Henri: “Have you not seen many pictures that bowled you over at first sight, staggered you on the next, and did not stir you thereafter?”) The second half of the evening usually found both Nan and the artists too tired for such considerations. Rat Woman had mentioned, in a previous session, the legendary model Charlie Moccio, who could maintain a handstand for twenty minutes. K chortu! thought Nan. Forget it.

  Brazen woman that she was—“The Dame That Shame Forgot,” Mel called her—she rarely felt naked anymore. Just nude. Mermaiding left her thoughts too free; they turned to last night’s TV news. Fear crept in goose bumps down her gracefully curved spine. Last week, May 7 had brought no message from Alex. Two months now without any word. Nan had had to let go of her anxiety for her daughter. Worry over Alex’s safety was too much, added to worry over Jane’s, worry over (Be honest!) her own. She could only hope, now, that Alex’s silence meant she was successfully lying low. Unlike Nan and Jane. The new developments in what the tabloids had christened the Deathmobile Drowning had made this morning’s New York Times. Murder, politicians, and sex—the media weren’t going to let go of an amalgam like that anytime soon. Earlier tonight, at dinner, Val had considered grimly and at Slavic length the chances of discovery. Suppose the Times decided to run the photo of the crowd watching the Deathmobile rise up out of the river—the mayor chomping on his cigar and, right behind him, Nan? The old Nan, with the cocker-spaniel hair; but still. The old recognizable Nan?

  Gabriel read the Times every morning.

  She tried to distract herself by looking at the sketchers. Balloon Butt kept yawning. From Nan’s angle her chin seemed to melt into her collarbone without benefit of neck. She’d brought someone new with her, an older man with a nose like a Bartlett pear—a drinker’s nose—and small black eyes. Nan could easily imagine him as a prison guard. “Draw the feet,” Rat Woman advised him. “Get the feet right, and the rest will draw itself.”

  “—sour cream, hard-boiled eggs, and scallions,” Prison Guard was saying to Balloon Butt. “You put it in the fridge overnight. Serve it with—of all things!—a boiled potato.”

  “Ugh!” from Mel.

  Three claps signaled the end of the evening. Nan stretched, put on her kimono, massaged her calves. Then she went down the hall to the restroom to get dressed.

  She and Mel left together, as usual. In the lobby of the Waterman Building a large red-and-yellow poster invited entries for a juried exhibition to celebrate Women’s History Month. OPEN SEASON FOR WOMEN ARTISTS! it said. Underneath, someone had written in large black letters, KILL ALL YOU WANT!

  Mel stalked over and tore the poster off the wall and flung it, a crumpled ball, into a corner. “Dumb-ass dickheads!”

  She hooked her arm through Nan’s and pushed open the heavy glass door onto Steeple Street. A cool wind off the river wrapped around them. “Nan,” she said, “what’re you gonna do?”

  |

  What could she do? That night, staring into the darkness of the midnight loft, its rough brick walls striped with moonlight, Nan made up her mind. Then she turned her face to the pillow, and slept.

  |

  “Nan—of course I’ll help. Only thing is, let’s level with each other.”

  They were lying head to foot in Deenie’s wide bed, in the sweet slow aftermath. Walker’s hand grasped Nan’s foot and moved it so that it lay against his cheek. He put his lips to the arch. “Annette,” he said. “Annette Boyce Mulholland.”

  She caught her breath. Her foot jerked, but he held it firmly. She felt the faint scratchiness of his day-old beard on her sole. “How did you know?”

  “Deenie’s photograph album. You were all over it. You two and your tucked-in schoolgirl smiles and your little starched round collars. What are you on the run from? You and Jane.”

  Play for time. “And you aren’t really an engineer, are you?”

  Walker’s grip on her foot tightened. She turned her head away. The long windows had filled with twilight, a blue so intense it seemed to squeeze her heart.

  Please. Tell me something I can believe.

  “CIA. Retired.”

  Thank you, God.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It’s not exactly America’s best-loved occupation.” He turned his head. Lips against her toes, he said, “I thought you wouldn’t sleep with me if you knew.”

  No wonder she’d felt comfortable with him immediately, that first time over coffee in Faunce House. His familiarity didn’t come from some buried resemblance to Deenie, but from being a type Nan had met over and over again in those years in the Foreign Service. How had she failed to put the clues together? His physique (trained—honed—for chasing and being chased); the briefcase concealing what Nan was now sure was a camera; the travel to exotic lands. Even his passion for ornithology—a good cover for someone who turned up in out-of-the-way places.

  But there was, unshakable, that something else that shimmered between them—that sintonia.

  Nan took a breath. “I kidnapped Jane.”

  She told him the whole story. He listened, motionless, one hand still grasping her ankle. When she finished, he closed his eyes.

  Nan felt free and light, literally unb
urdened, for the first time in nearly six months. Even not knowing what Walker’s silence meant. From her perspective, squinting down the length of their naked bodies in the fading afternoon light, he looked pained. Maybe he disapproved. She had no idea what his religious beliefs were, if any; or his morals, when it came to something like this, to lawbreaking. Maybe just knowing Nan made him an accomplice, put him in violation of some CIA equivalent of the Hippocratic oath.

  She needn’t have worried.

  That night Walker showed Nan his tools. (Some giggling, like errant children, over the word tool.) Besides the briefcase that concealed a camera, there was a signet ring that could hold a microdot; a wallet of lock-picking tools (“surreptitious entry kit,” Walker called it); a buffalo nickel with a hidden curved blade; a fountain pen that contained a microdot viewer. Some of these things—the lock-picking set, the coin—were museum pieces, he told her, issued forty-odd years before, when he’d first joined the Farm. One hand fiddled with a miniature wrench, sliding it in and out of its pocket in the lock-picking wallet.

  Did he have a gun?

  You bet.

  Goose bumps of horrified interest pricked Nan’s bare arms. Where was it?

  In a safe place.

  And no pious invocation of the danger of guns around small children would pry it out of him.

  They went out into the small backyard. They had a rare whole night with each other. Jane was spending the night with Mel and Val, to give Nan a break, Mel had said—though really it was as much for Mel as for Nan. It was a warm night, the calm, voluptuous darkness pocked with fireflies. Lightning bugs, Walker called them. The air was full of the sound of crickets. They lay on their backs in the soft, fragrant new grass. He told her the two stories of his life with guns.

  The first story was also the story of how he came to be a CIA agent. Drafted right after college, at the height of the “Police Action” in Korea, he found himself in OCS. He was sent, he never knew why, to ordnance school. “No aptitude test was involved. No aptitude was involved.” During lectures on the color codes of ammunition, he read, under his desk, J. K. Wright’s Encyclopedia of Ornithology; during lectures on how to set up an ordnance company in the field, he read The Origin of Species. He failed four out of the six exams. Each time, he had to write a letter to his CO explaining his failure and ending, “It will never happen again.” The army didn’t send incompetents into battle, in accordance, Walker said dryly, with the National Gene Pool Reduction Act. Walker was transferred to Intelligence. He went to Germany instead of Korea.

  “So that’s how guns saved my life.”

  The night sky, as Nan’s eyes adjusted to the dark, filled with stars. They seemed to crowd the sky, to jostle each other. She’d read somewhere that the stars were moving infinitesimally closer together all the time.

  “Some as large as goose eggs, some as small as hemp seed,” Walker said softly.

  “You know that? I didn’t know you read Chekhov.” Her heart lifted with delight.

  “You love me,” Walker said, in the same soft voice.

  She stiffened. “The usual thing is to say, I love you.”

  “But you already know that.”

  He did not touch her, or even reach for her hand, which lay in the cool, prickly grass inches from his own. She said nothing. The ringing of the crickets seemed to grow louder, like the ringing of a thousand tiny bells. After a while Walker resumed their previous conversation.

  The second story was about death.

  “Christy always set out spring bulbs in autumn. Said it helped her to be able to think across winter.”

  Ah, Christy. Dogs instead of children; Christy had been the child, Nan divined.

  “She was shot in our own backyard. By a hunter who mistook her for a deer. It wasn’t even hunting season yet; he was up from New York, poaching. Christy had these orange mittens. Fluorescent orange. She wouldn’t wear hats. Her brain couldn’t breathe in them, she said; they trapped the bad thoughts inside. But that day she didn’t have the mittens on, either. October fourteenth—it was too early.”

  “What happened?” Better this subject than love.

  “She died in the ambulance. Good Christ! They wouldn’t let me ride with her. We’d had a fight that morning. Sometimes I’d forget that she wasn’t all there, that you couldn’t expect—The hell of it was, there were times she did mean what she said. Just, you couldn’t be sure. That morning she made me so mad I broke the toaster oven. I lost command of myself.”

  Well, of course you did; she was bonkers, Nan wanted to say. Chivalry! Why were men always drawn to the unstable ones, the ones who glittered? The dangerous—or at least, the uncertain.

  Me?

  “I’m sorry, Walker,” she said; and she was. Sorry for more than he knew, but certainly sorry for this death, so grim, so gratuitous. She felt him withdraw. He didn’t want her pity. There was a long silence in which love and death seemed to hang in the night sky. Then they got up and went inside, leaving the stars to their slow collision course, the sweet smell of new grass, the clamoring crickets.

  |

  In Walker Warren Tice’s former line of work there was no such thing as a résumé. If there had been, his would have read something like this.

  1953:

  B.S. in Biology, Colby College, Waterville, ME

  1953–56:

  Underling [very far under] at the National Science Foundation, Washington, DC

  1956:

  Applied [out of a combination of boredom and irony] to the CIA

  1957:

  “The Farm,” Camp Peary, Virginia: Training in covert action, self-defense, and murder with and without a weapon

  1958-60:

  Field agent: Assigned first to Bonn, then to West Berlin [known at the time as “Spy City”]

  Cover:

  Deputy Agricultural Attaché, specializing in ornithological ecology

  1961:

  Loved: Danuta Freiborg, an East German actress

  Married:

  Claire Christine Atkins, a secretary at the Embassy in Budapest. [Marriage to an “indigene” would have ended his career]

  1960s:

  Remained in West Berlin [young man on the rise]: Highly successful operative; Prague uprising; first kill

  1972-73:

  Langley AFB: Trained young field agents

  1974:

  Angola: Assistant to the Political Attaché

  1978:

  South Africa: Political Attaché

  1983:

  Langley

  1984:

  Afghanistan

  1987:

  Langley: Permanent Training Staff at the Farm

  1994:

  Retired to Blue Hill, ME [back to boredom and irony]

  All this Nan pieced together over the next few days, amazed at how often, over the years, her life and Walker’s might have intersected. (Had he and she passed each other on the snowy Kurfürstendamm in 1961? Crossed at the same light on Pennsylvania Avenue under the blossoming cherry trees in 1973?) Walker had been a man of action, intrepid, resourceful. Now his experience—all the things he knew and could do and had been for years unhappily unable to use—was once again needed. A man in need of a mission had met a woman in need of rescue. You see, girls—Attila the Nun—See how God provides.

  |

  In Swan Point Cemetery the afternoon light was warm on their three faces. Walker and Nan and Jane strolled along winding gravel paths past headstones green with age, the occasional looming marble angel, newer graves garlanded with May blossoms. A clump of hazelnuts littered the ground with bright yellow catkins. Nan took deep breaths of spring-scented air. They passed two lovers with their hands in the back pockets of each other’s jeans, a white-haired man on Rollerblades, three little girls carrying bunches of buttercups. Walker pointed out the notched tail of a barn swallow, sitting on a large marble monument to ABNER DAGGETT, KILLED BY LIGHTNING, 1937.

  They came to a space without gravestones. Grass dotted
with buttercups spread downhill to a small pond. Pushing through a glittery mesh of gnats, they laid out a quilt under some magnolia trees. Jane clutched a stuffed lion—“Lion King,” she corrected Nan—which, whenever she squeezed it, seemed to fart. Walker had bought it for her on their way up Hope Street. He’d also bought her slippers in the shape of fire engines; when pressed, they made a noise like sirens. Are there no silent toys anymore? wondered Nan.

  It was only eleven thirty; no one was hungry. Jane fitted herself between Nan and Walker and leaned back, comfortable, proprietary. They sat in silence for a while. To the other visitors—few, on a Sunday morning—they would have looked (from a distance, anyway) like a family. A little family of three, their quilt a small blue raft afloat on a sea of yellow buttercups.

  The day Nan’s mother, dead of a heart attack at thirty-six, was buried, leaves had covered the ground, leaves everywhere, yellow and darker yellow and gold. The night’s rain made their colors sing, and the autumn sun, reflecting off them, turned the whole world saffron. Their smell was rich and wormy; their yellow light shone upward, like a thousand buttercups held under your chin. How had Nan gotten the idea of putting letters into the ground? The letters laid inside the coffin, was that it? Dorothea’s idea: she and Pop and Nan had each written a good-bye, to be buried with the woman who had been daughter-in-law, wife, mother. Four-year-old Nan had had to dictate hers. Afterward, every October, Dorothea took her to the grave, where she wrote to her dead mother about the year just ended and tamped the folded paper into the soft earth under the yellow leaves. ANNETTE FREIHOFER BOYCE, WIFE AND MOTHER DEEPLY LOVED, 1914–1943. “where your treasure lies, there shall your heart be also” Nan would put her ear to the ground and listen, feeling, even as a teenager, a presence. Something trying to speak.

  “Look!” Walker said. A heron stood in a clump of reeds at the far end of the pond. A tall, scholarly-looking bird: long neck, long legs, long pointed bill. Walker erupted in a little lecture about heronry, the family Ardeidae, the diet of freshwater birds (minnows and frogs). Jane listened with an air of indulgence. A boring bird, Nan thought; and then: If only we could stay this way for always. They watched the heron amble away along the shallows.