The Year She Disappeared

by Ann Harleman

  Walker said, “Janey, why don’t you go see what those kids are doing? See them jumping, over there, under the trees? Looks like there might be a trampoline.”

  Jane dawdled down to the little pond and wandered along its rim. Nan could hear the Lion King farting. The sound mingled with the voices of unseen children, the call of blue jays from the willows at the pond’s edge.

  Walker said, “There’s a guy. He’s up in Boston now, but he used to operate out of Georgia. The CIA used him a lot back in the seventies. We used to call him Our Man in Savannah, back when I was at the Farm. He arranges things for people who need to get out of the country.”

  Nan picked up a tiny white-feathered triangle—the air was full of them, twirling and drifting by—and sat turning it over between her fingers. Winged, pointed, on its way to propagate. Spring, she thought, really is all about sex. “You think we should leave.”

  “It’s only a matter of time before you’re spotted.” Walker’s eyes rested on the top of her head. “Cockatiel crest and all.”

  “But Alex said—”

  “You can’t depend on Alex. One, she’s gone into hiding, you don’t know why. Something’s gone wrong with her plan. Two, you can’t reach her, thanks to her cockamamie message setup.”

  Walker’s scorn was clear, and Nan felt a stab of annoyance. He’s a man who needs a mission, she reminded herself. But she remembered how Deenie had despised the idea of being rescued. D in D! she used to cry, scornfully. Damsel in Distress.

  “This man. He’ll work for you? Even though you’re retired?”

  “Of course, Nan. That’s the whole point. We were in the field together. In Berlin. If it wasn’t for me, Sam would’ve bought it back in sixty-four.”

  It was the first time he’d ever sounded impatient with her. She’d forgotten that saviors tend to feel they own whoever they save. She reached for a clump of buttercups. They came up unresisting, earth clinging to the shallow roots.

  Walker said, “Look, it’s hard to leave here. I know that. But Janey’s not safe. She needs—”

  “I know what Jane needs.”

  “Sam can set up everything. Visas, passports—”

  “False passports.”

  “They’ll be watching the airports, Nan. You can’t use your own names.”

  Nan remained silent, grinding the buttercups between her palms. If she wasn’t careful, they would find themselves having their first quarrel here among all this green, all this bright spring promise. What she really wanted, she realized, was for Walker to say we. For Walker to come with them. The thought shook her. She clapped her palms together to brush off the buttercups’ sticky golden dust.

  “What do you think I should do?” she asked.

  “You and Janey move in with me. Right now, this afternoon. If—”

  “I can’t do that. I can’t move her again, not now, not when she’s finally happy.”

  “You’ve got to, Nan. Happy doesn’t make you safe. If I can figure out who you are, others can, too.”

  “But—”

  “Sam’ll need time to make the passports and visas. Credit cards; driver’s licenses. Say, three or four days. Then you can go.”

  “Where?”

  “Wherever you want.” So she was a partner in her own destiny. “I’d suggest New Zealand. No extradition for custody cases. No language problem. Easier for Jane, with school and all. Any rate, if you don’t like it, you can always go somewhere else from there. Bali, say,” he added with unexpected whimsy, and smiled.

  Nan mentioned money, her lack thereof. She could pay him back eventually, she told him, having no idea how. Not necessary, he said, looking uncomfortable. Sunlight through the flowering branches above them splashed his face, making it look somehow naked. Nan looked away. She should not accept all this from someone she did not love. Should not. Had to.

  She found herself saying, “We could go to Europe. Jane and I, I mean. We could go to, to Genoa.”

  “Genoa?” His tone was incredulous.

  “Tod was stationed there. It’s a place I know. A language I know.”

  “Nan. Thing is, if you don’t want ’em to nail you, don’t go where they’ll predict you might go. Lines of desire, we used to call it. You look at the person—their past, mostly, because the past is the best predictor of future behavior—along with their personality, their temperament. Then you sort of graph all that, extrapolate from it. What vectors does it yield? Those are the lines they’ll follow. The lines of desire. Those are the directions they’re driven in, instinctively, like migrating birds. Like herds of elephants crossing the veldt—they’ll charge right through a village if it’s in the line of march.”

  Nan had had much the same thoughts about Alex, about where she might go to hide from Gabriel. She felt in her bag for a cigarette. Walker lit it for her.

  What he said sounded logical. Commonsensical, as the nuns used to say. Were spies that? How could a reasonably normal person—a person whom she, Nan Mulholland, could recline next to on a blue quilt on a sunny May morning—be a spy? He sounded so confident. Too confident? She stubbed out her cigarette in the springy new grass.

  Walker picked up the butt and began to fieldstrip it. “Spy biz isn’t all that different from any other line of work. It just takes the usual stuff—goodwill, vigilance, a taste for the absurd. And it’s a helluva lot more interesting than working for IBM.” He frowned. “Where’s Jane? I can’t see her.”

  Nan looked toward the pond, shading her eyes against the buttercup brightness, the white winged seeds glittering through the air. “There she is. See? Talking to the little boy in the red overalls. You don’t make it sound very exciting.”

  “What?”

  “Spy biz.”

  “The more like James Bond an agent is, the less likely he is to be successful. Same principle as with gadgets. Simple is always better than complicated, because it’s more dependable.”

  Like washing machines, thought Nan, who’d always bought bottom-of-the-line, the model with the fewest knobs.

  “Nap if you want,” Walker said. He must have wanted to, himself. “I’ll look out for Janey.”

  Out on the pond the heron gave a single slap of its wings, heaved itself into the air, and was gone.

  “You nap,” Nan said. “I’ll go check on her.”

  She found her granddaughter on the trampoline in the middle of a stand of poplars. Her small blue-jeaned body rose and fell among those of several other children, some even smaller than Jane. Her face, like theirs, was pink with pleasure. Nan watched, envious. Then suddenly she was hoisting herself (Thank you, Nautilus!) over the metal frame and onto the canvas.

  Bounding; landing; bounding again. The sensation of being free yet impelled, in motion without effort, was surely the next best thing to flying. Jane looked astonished, then mortified. She stopped moving and stood there, balancing against the waves made by the other children. Breathless, a little dizzy, Nan kept on jumping. The other children shrieked at her and giggled; then the little boy in red overalls caromed over to jump alongside her. Nan felt strong, soaring, invincible. The little boy beside her executed a neat cannonball, then grabbed Jane’s hand. Soon they were all, even Jane, bounding happily up and down. Anything seemed possible. Nan threw back her head and laughed in delight. No doubt Walker was right, about lines of desire. Yet visions of Liguria, the scent of umbrella pines and olive trees, the cool call of church bells through the late-afternoon heat, enveloped her when she closed her eyes.

  Ten

  On May 20, the Providence County medical examiner revealed the cause of death of the governor’s niece. She hadn’t drowned; she’d been smothered, probably with a plastic bag, then held under water—tap water—before being put into the car.

  Of course it made the headlines, not just local but national. TV news programs reran the footage of the car being lifted from the water, the mayor with his cigar, and Nan. “Hey!” said the woman in the CAN’T FART T-shirt when Nan stopped by the little
newsstand to pick up USA Today and the New York Times. “Ain’t you that woman on Channel 10?”

  On the next day, May 21, there was at last a message from Alex.

  POOKIE: Location, location, location. Love you both. HIPPIE

  Location, location, location: Alex’s absurd signal for the worst eventuality. He knows where you are.

  Only he doesn’t. Thanks to Walker.

  Nan’s eyes kept sliding off Alex’s message to the one below:

  LOOK HERE WILMA. Ain’t a lumpy chick on this planet gonna make me forget who is and always be my Number One.

  If only she could be Wilma, lucky Wilma, scanning the Personals for lighthearted words of love. But then (her eyes escaping to the wide sun-filled windows of the Reference Room) there was love here for her. Both, Alex’s message said. Love you both.

  |

  Val offered to take Janechka to his mother in Novosibirsk.

  “She doesn’t speak Russian,” Nan said, as though this was the only possible objection to such a plan.

  “Nyet problema.”

  How good they were to her, these former strangers! Reparation for the part they might have played in Deenie’s death; insurance against Nan’s revealing what she knew about it. Nan saw this; but she also saw their love for Jane. In a way, Mel and Val were Deenie’s gift to her, Deenie’s legacy.

  Gently Nan turned him down. She could not be separated from her only granddaughter, she told him, appealing to his Slavic sense of family, of blood. Then (against Walker’s advice) she said that she and Jane were leaving, that Walker had offered to help them disappear.

  Mel was silent during this exchange, which took place in whispers in Nan’s living room while Jane slept behind her screen. Her face was—Nan realized that this was the first time she’d ever seen it so—grim. She said, “Nan! You barely know this guy. He’s old. The male brain shrinks faster than the female brain with age, did you know that? You’re gonna trust Janey—Janey—to a guy whose brain is smaller than yours? Jump back!”

  Val said, “What plan you have? Where you will go?”

  Nan couldn’t tell him, since she didn’t know. And Walker’s eminent qualifications, his CIA past, were a secret that wasn’t hers to tell. She let Mel abuse her further—“Bunbrain!” she shouted at one point—until she finally stomped out of the apartment. Val, with a reproachful, dark-eyed look at Nan, followed.

  |

  Here came that feeling again—the sense of being tailed. A presence behind you; someone on the other side of a door, a window. On the leafy streets of Providence, Nan’s scalp tingled with it, as if she were still behind the Iron Curtain. A totalitarian regime does not keep under surveillance all of its citizens all of the time; it merely makes them think it does (HOWDY). Each morning, coming out of the building with Jane, she looked up and down Elbow Street; climbing the steps of the bus, she took one last look behind her; every afternoon, when she picked Jane up, she asked Mikki whether anyone had spoken to Jane, any stranger.

  There was no one. No one walking behind them; no one in the shadows of a doorway; no one Mikki (with, each time, a quick assessing look at Nan) had noticed. Yet the feeling persisted.

  Then on one warm, bright afternoon, walking down Hope Street on their way to meet Walker, Jane waved to a man in a plaid scarf pulled up over his chin. A wool scarf, on a bright May morning. “Oh,” she said airily, in answer to Nan’s question, “I saw him across the street, at Mikki’s. We were making a mud man. In the yard.”

  Nan felt her stomach leap.

  The police? Gabriel’s agent? A reporter?

  If the man was following them, he was no match for HOWDY’S lose-your-pursuer tactics. Nan grabbed Jane’s hand and dragged her into the little children’s resale shop, then out its back door into a tree-shaded parking lot. They walked the four blocks to Elmgrove Avenue and caught a different bus downtown.

  She told Walker about the incident. They were head-to-foot in Deenie’s big bed, enjoying the afterglow, for what Nan feared might be the last time. Walker sat up. He swung Nan’s legs over the edge of the bed so that she had to sit up, too.

  “Where there’s smoke, there’s toast,” he said. Then, “Here’s what we do.”

  |

  For that we, Nan very nearly loved him. It made her (giddy from relief mixed with fear) think of an old joke, Tod’s favorite. The Lone Ranger and Tonto are trapped on a hill, surrounded by hostile Indians, no way to escape. “Tonto!” cries the Lone Ranger. “What are we going to do?” Tonto turns to look at him. “What do you mean ‘we,’ white man?”

  In the hectic, difficult two days that followed, Nan treasured Walker’s we as she treasured Alex’s both. Two talismans against fear and doubt.

  |

  Morning. Hot. Sunshine and the smell of coffee woke her. The linoleum stuck to the soles of her bare feet when she walked into Deenie’s kitchen, releasing them with little sucking sounds. Jane and Walker sat side by side at the scrubbed wooden table, eating Frosted Flakes. Nan poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down across from them. In her hand was the copy of Methods of Disguise that she’d stolen from the Rockefeller Library weeks before. Fortunately, she’d thought to tuck it into their suitcase when she and Jane had packed for the move here, to Deenie’s.

  Walker was silent, thinking. One hand, palm up, offered itself to Nan across the table. She grasped it gratefully. Beside him Jane turned the pages of What Do People Do All Day? as she ate her cereal. Zipper sat in her lap with his chin on the edge of the table, eyes following the progress of her spoon. Beyond the screen door a bird sang, one continuous burning note.

  “It’s on,” Walker said. “We leave tomorrow.”

  Jane looked up from her book. “Leave? Whaddaya mean leave? We just got here.”

  “It’s only a few days earlier than we planned.” Walker was talking to Nan. Those sure blue eyes, though, looked not at her but at something beyond her, invisible. The eyes were serious, but his voice held a note of buried glee. How men love action! Nan thought. Still, she could lean on this man, as she’d realized back in March; she was leaning on him. Completely.

  From nowhere Walker produced a small tablet and a pencil and began writing. (1) Call Sam, Nan read, upside down.

  “Leave?” Jane repeated. “Whaddaya mean leave? Zipper likes it here!” She clutched the surprised cat to her chest. Birdsong came again, closer now, pure and clear through the screen door.

  “Hear that, Janey?” Walker said. “That’s a cardinal. He’s courting his lady.”

  Jane leapt from her chair and ran to the door and began slapping the leather strap of Deenie’s sleigh bells against it.

  “I’m not leaving!” she shouted. “I’m not!”

  Zipper struggled in her arms, clawing and spitting, broke free and streaked out of the room. Jane kept on ringing the bells, her face gleaming with tears and snot. A bright beading of blood sprang up along her bare arm from Zipper’s claws.

  Looking at it, Nan felt her head go light. She pushed back her chair and bent over until her chin rested on her knees. The sound of the bells, oddly festive, beat at her ears.

  Walker got up and in two strides had his arms around Jane. “Stop it!” he shouted—the first time he’d ever shouted at her. “Stop that damn racket!” There was a slap, followed by wild, hiccupy sobbing. Then Nan heard Jane’s bare feet running out of the room.

  When she looked up, Walker stood in the middle of the kitchen with a hand cupped over one eye. His face wore an expression of mixed anger, pity, and pain. “She hit me,” he said.

  “Leave her alone for a while,” Nan said. Her head had cleared. Stupid to be this way about a little blood, at her age. “I’ll go to her in a minute.” In the space of two days Jane had had to leave Mikki and the other children, leave the loft, leave Val and Mel. Too much leaving, Nan thought, her stomach clenched in sympathy.

  Walker got on the phone, spoke a few clipped phrases. “Got ’em? Okay. Okay. Eleven.” He hung up and turned to Nan. “Get her now
. We’re going out. Sam wants all three of us.”

  “Why? Why can’t just you go, and pick up the stuff? He’s got our photographs already.”

  “Nan.” Weighty tone of male patience. “Sam is doing this as a personal favor. It’s off-the-charts illegal, what he’s doing for us. He has one rule—he never makes docs for people he hasn’t met.”

  “Do we really have to leave the country? What if we all looked completely different?” She held out Methods of Disguise. Walker glanced at it and snorted.

  “Good Christ, Nan! Have you lost your marbles?” Then, seeing her face, seeing the way her outstretched hand, holding the lurid yellow book, trembled, “Aw, come on.”

  He walked around behind her chair and put one palm across her forehead in an oddly soothing gesture.

  “Come on. Everything’ll be okay. You’re with me.”

  |

  “Sketchy. Sketchy.”

  Our Man in Savannah had reservations about Walker’s escape route. Nan sat on the sofa (a genuine Biedermeier, she could swear) beside Jane, each of them holding a lightly sweating glass of cold lemonade. A warm breeze plied this, the wrong side of Boston, with the rank smell of uncollected garbage from the street below. She tried not to stare at this man who, one cold December night by the Wannsee—Walker had told her on the drive up here—had killed the East German agent chasing Walker. (“S-T-R-A-N-G-L-E-D,” he’d spelled out, because of Jane.) The house was shabby, peeling, with a falling-down porch along one side; but the room, with its velvet-covered furniture, blazed with flowers in pots and vases. A contradiction, like its owner.

  “Not from where I sit,” Walker was saying. “From where I sit, we’re cookin’ with gas. Fly to Chicago, scuff up our trail there, then go Minneapolis/San Francisco/Auckland. Plan’s so sweet it could give you pimples.”