The Year She Disappeared

by Ann Harleman

  Nan was silent. She did not like to be rebuked, especially by men, especially if they were her lovers. More than one of whom had, in the past, brought about the end of the affair in just that way.

  “Nan? It’s important. A closed mouth gathers no feet.”

  The attempt at lightness, with its little accompanying heh-heh, an old person’s laugh, infuriated her.

  “For how long? How long am I supposed to be full of suspicion and withdrawal? Just while we’re traveling, or after we get to”—would they really, ever?—“New Zealand?”

  “This is no time for sarcasm, Nan. We can’t afford it.”

  His voice made Nan look at him, really look, for the first time in days. Maybe he wasn’t as calm as she’d thought. His cleanliness seemed to be wearing thin. The OLD AGE AND TREACHERY T-shirt looked gray at the edges, and his eye, where Jane had hit him yesterday morning, had begun to swell, the skin around it puffy and bright.

  You twit. This man is helping you—you and Jane. He doesn’t need to flee the country. And what’s more (oh, coals of fire), he’ll never point that out. Never say (like the Last Lover), I feel like you drove a truck through my life.

  Nan sighed for the backward nature of things. If the Last Lover had been like Walker, how that would have delighted her. Or then again, if things with Walker had been allowed to unfold naturally— First we elope, she thought, later we’ll be courting. “Sorry,” she said—coughed, really. A hard little pellet of a word, a word (Alex had often pointed out) rarely uttered by Nan.

  While they were talking, the afternoon had turned gloomy, brightness fallen from the air, the birds silent. Nan watched Red Suspenders blow out the candles and cut the cake. When he’d served it, he turned his picnic basket upside down and sat on it. As he ate, he talked, gesturing with his fork to the empty place opposite.

  Walker moved closer to Nan. His thumb stroked her anklebone. He said—his own oblique apology—“Butterflies have their sense of smell in their feet. Did you know that?”

  “You told me, in March. The first time we made love.”

  Abashed, he pulled up a blade of grass and twirled it between his fingers.

  As she was vowing internally to be better, nicer—for how could this whole plan possibly work, otherwise?—he said, “Actually, I have a confession to make. As they say.”

  He paused; Nan waited.

  “Thing is, I was afraid you—that if you had plenty of money, you wouldn’t need me.”

  “Walker. What are you talking about?”

  “Like I told you, Deenie mentioned you in her will. Thing is, it was more than just a mention.”

  Nan arranged her face in an expression of nonjudgmental encouragement, a look she’d often worn for the Last Lover.

  “She left her estate to be divided equally between me and you. That’s, well, it’s roughly four hundred thousand. Each.”

  Walker’s sigh of unburdenedness, of relief, made Nan catch her breath in outrage. “You lied to me?” she said loudly. Walker made shushing motions. “All this time?”

  The first drops of rain fell. Jane woke, stretching luxuriously, then remembered she was mad, and frowned.

  “Nan!” Walker said urgently. “Look—I’m sorry. But you couldn’t have collected the money, anyway—not without revealing who you are.”

  “So what happened to it? When you couldn’t find me?”

  Walker looked uncomfortable again; his wattle turned red. “It, uh, it reverts to me.”

  That does it.

  Trembling with fury, Nan stood up. One foot had gone to sleep and she stumbled, which made her even more furious. She turned her back to Walker. “Time to go, Sweetpea!”

  Jane shook her head. “I wanna write a letter,” she whined. “Like you did, Nana. And dig it in the ground.”

  “Who to?” Nan began gathering the remains of their picnic and hurling them into the basket, then thought, Fuck it. She grabbed her jacket and thrust her arms into it, then picked up Jane’s.

  “To Daddy.”

  Nan went cold all over, the skin on her bare neck prickling, and not with rain. She’d forgotten that she’d told Jane about writing letters to her dead mother. It must have been weeks ago. Why in the world had she mentioned it? She held out Jane’s jacket.

  “We don’t have time. Look how dark the sky is. It’s going to pour. Come on, Sweetpea, let’s—”

  “I want to!” Jane cried. She stamped one foot, then the other, then both, jumping up and down on the grass. “I want to! I have to!”

  Nan looked around nervously. Red Suspenders, who sat on at his lace-covered table oblivious to the rain, was watching them with interest. On the gravel path a young mother holding a newspaper over the head of her baby stopped to stare.

  “Good Christ!” Walker said. He reached for Jane, but she leapt away. By now it was raining in earnest, fat drops that exploded softly as they hit the ground. The wind had shifted, bringing the seaweed smell of the ocean to mingle with the odors of damp earth and grass.

  “I wanna write a letter to Daddy!”

  Walker and Jane stood, frozen for an endless second, on opposite sides of the blue quilt. Jane’s face was red and angry and she was coughing, a tight, clanky cough, like a cowbell. We’ll be drenched by the time we get back to the car, Nan thought. She longed to rub Jane’s hair dry with a linen towel, the way Dorothea used to do when Nan got caught in the rain, then give her hot milk and honey, to ward off a chill.

  Walker hesitated, she saw, because of the people watching. Red Suspenders hooked a pair of spectacles over his ears and stared through them; a little knot, now, of mothers with young children stood on the cinder path in the rain.

  “You said we were gonna have a nice picnic. But it’s not. It’s not!” Gusty sobs; more of that clanky cough.

  Too many good-byes, Nan thought. She said, “Jane—come over here. Look! I’ve got”—patting her fanny pack—”some paper. We’ll write a—”

  Walker’s hand encircled Nan’s arm. He said in a loud, carrying, calmly parental voice, “Lee! Time to go home! Let’s pack up!”

  “I’m not Lee! I’m Jane!” Screaming, now. Beyond her granddaughter Nan saw Suspenders rummage in his picnic basket, pull out something small and black—a camera?—no, a cell phone. He punched in a number, then held it to his ear.

  Walker saw it, too. He crossed the quilt and seized Jane by the shoulders.

  Nan became aware of pain, a grim radiance in the center of her midriff. Like nausea, only not. She felt in her fanny pack for the little plastic vial, opened it, stood there with the nitro in her palm, gauging the pain, willing it to leave. Rain slid down her bare arms, warm as blood.

  Jane writhed and twisted in Walker’s grasp. He looked around at the spectators, but held on. She kicked him in the shins. Wincing, he threw one arm across her chest. Jane bent her head and opened her mouth wide. Nan saw the shine of her teeth as they closed around flesh.

  With a wordless shout, Walker let go. Jane ran.

  “Go to the car! Wait there!” Walker called to Nan. He was too upset to see her distress or notice the vial of pills in her hand. He took off after Jane, a flash of yellow T-shirt that disappeared behind a stone mausoleum.

  Nan sank to the ground. She was still clutching the pill. The drenched grass clung to her bare legs and rain soaked her skirt.

  “You in trouble?”

  Red Suspenders, beside her, was barely audible over the sudden baying of dogs, a racket Nan realized must be inside her own head. “Help is on the way. Just rest, and don’t move. That boy of yours. Where’d he get to?”

  For a second Nan couldn’t think who he was talking about. The imaginary dogs were so loud. “He—he ran after his cat.”

  He crouched down beside her. He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and began to pat her face gently, wiping away the rain. “What’s his name, again? You take it easy now. Just rest.”

  “Zipper.”

  “No. Your boy.”

  Odd line of que
stioning. Then she remembered the grandson—in the swing. Billy. Dead Billy. If only she could lift her hand. Why was the pill so heavy?

  “I—” she managed, over the plaintive voices of the dogs. “His name is…”

  She had forgotten Jane’s alias.

  Suspenders’ face loomed close to hers, suspicion in his eyes. She felt his hand on her shoulder. The hand wore a wristwatch. She could hear it ticking. Drops of water slid off the hand and darkened the denim of her jacket just over her breast. It seemed as if she’d been waiting all her life for this hand—so inescapable, so firm. So heavy, as if freighted with the transgressions of a lifetime.

  The pain widened. The dog choir swelled. Nan shut her eyes. Breathe. Scent of grass; bitter odor of wet leaves.

  “Nan Mulholland?”

  Eleven

  Cage. Cage of pain. Rib cage.

  “I always put out my lawn deer at the first sign a spring.”

  “I mean, they’re the, the hob …”

  “Harbinger.”

  “Uh-huh. The hobbinger of spring. Shit! Where’d I put that catheter?”

  A shroud of light, like a ship’s sail. A square of darkness: glass. Window glass.

  “Then, the week after, I put out the chipmunks— Hey! She’s comin’ around. Get the doc, would you, hon?”

  Hands. Smells. Where is this? Hospital. Tod? Tod is dead. Oh—that old sorrow, waking and stretching inside. Grasping the bars of the cage.

  “There’s a God,” someone said, and someone else said, “Where?”

  Good question.

  “Out in the hall. I said, you can just wait out there till we’re done, it’s too crowded in here.”

  God in the hall? I’m dying, then?

  More hands. Injunctions to open her eyes, which she did.

  Of course. This was the Emergency Room. Not the one where they always took Tod. Somewhere else, somewhere back East, Providence, yes, that was it. New England voices. But it might as well have been Seattle. The same canvas enclosure, the same hard light pouring down, the window dark and misted with cold, a cold she could feel, cold as a duck’s foot. No—that was the stethoscope, wielded by a twelve-year-old in a white lab coat. The adolescent staff of Emergency Rooms, is that why the vending machines are full of different kinds of potato chips? Plain, sour cream, salsa. Other kinds, too. What are the others? The others! I need to find— Find—

  “Mrs. Mullen, you’re gonna be okay. Atrial fibrillation. Syncope—uh—you fainted. But in all probability, no heart attack. You’re fine.”

  Fine?

  |

  Sometime later. Nan knew it was later, because the square of darkness had been replaced by one of luminous pink. Sunrise. A blessed absence of human voices. She could hear the beep of heart monitors, hers and one in the next cubicle, competing. Somewhere beyond the canvas curtain an ice machine produced occasional eruptions. She remembered the sound from all those nights with Tod: a huge steel stomach in distress. There was a smell, sulfur, like rotten eggs. Like Dorothea’s hair when she gave herself a permanent. A dark-blue figure sat in one corner of the cubicle. Solid, motherly. Dorothea sat by my bed, long ago. Am I hallucinating?

  A flurry of excited noise, an unseen gurney wheeled into the cubicle on Nan’s other side, bulges in the canvas, someone muttering, “Shit!” and then, more loudly, “Can’t nobody tell a patient from a corpse out there? Fuck Admitting! That’s twice this week.”

  On the wall a yellow chart said, PAIN INTENSITY RATING SCALE CONVERSION TOOL. It seemed important to decipher this. Pain, okay: I understand pain. (Not so much now, though, she noted, interrogating the region of her diaphragm.) Intensity rating: in my case, LOW. Then the question of what one might convert pain to—now, that was something she’d been wondering about for years. Offer it up, the nuns used to say. Nan had offered up visits to the dentist for the pagan babies in Africa: the hot metallic smell of Dr. Diefenbach’s drill, the odor of her own sweat, the pain. Novocain cost extra.

  The blue figure rose from its corner and went out. There was some hissing and shushing. Then the woman—it was a woman, wide, upholstered, with the reassuring solidity of a dressmaker’s dummy—returned and sat down. She didn’t look in Nan’s direction. The waltz of the heart monitors was audible again in the silence, eerily gay.

  Mail carrier? Flight attendant? One of the Three Fates? No, of course not: it was a policewoman. Remembering everything—the last picnic, the sudden rainstorm, Red Suspenders—Nan came abruptly into possession of herself, and as quickly thought, Mustn’t let them know. She turned her head away from the seated figure.

  “Why am I always the one that has to take their rings off them?” the voice from the next cubicle complained. “Shit! This one’s fuckin’ stuck”

  “That’s a job for the funeral parlor,” another voice said. “Everybody dies. You’re born to die.”

  “Takes some getting used to.”

  Nan laughed out loud. Instantly the blue figure was up and leaning over her. Not grandmotherly at all. The face inches from Nan’s had cold doll-like blue eyes.

  “Mrs. Mullen?” Her voice was too loud. “I’m Officer O’Farrell. I’m your god.”

  |

  Questions. Waking again, in a different room, a room whose windows were full of shining green leaves, Nan emerged to a world of questions.

  Can you understand me, Mrs. Mullen? Are you feeling well enough to follow? Do you have an attorney?

  Mornin’, Miz Mullen. Can you stick this under your tongue?

  Mrs. Mulholland? Captain Abernathy, Providence police. Can you tell us the whereabouts of Jane Elizabeth Verdi?

  Mine was completely prefforated. You ever had a prefforated ulcer? Nice to have a roomie again. What’re you in for?

  Reason being that, folks who don’t have a lawyer, the court’ll appoint one. You just let me or Officer O’Farrell know, okay? Ma’am?

  Afternoon, Miz Mullen. No poop in the pooper? Think you better have an enema?

  DOCTOR PING? DOCTOR WALTER PING?

  … charge of Kidnapping. We can make it hard for you, or we can make it easy. Where is the child?

  Gene Riccio, Providence Journal. What a story! If you tell it honestly, which I can already see you wouldn’t be able to do any other way. So—it is true you kidnapped your granddaughter?

  Those dittoheads at the Public Defender put you on my schedule this morning and nobody let me know. You been arraigned yet? No? All-righty. You understand that I’m your court-appointed counsel?

  DOCTOR PING. THIRD PAGE. DOCTOR WALTER PING. WHERE THE HELL IS THE FUCKER? SHIT! IT’S STILL ON?

  Hi, Miz Mullen. I’m David? I’ll be your nurse tonight?

  |

  “Mulholland!” Nan shouted at the hapless phlebotomist, who was so astonished that she jerked her needle painfully out of Nan’s forearm. “Mulholland! Mulholland!”

  |

  So—Red Suspenders had turned her in. By the afternoon of her first full day in Methfessel Memorial Hospital Nan was lucid enough to start piecing things together. Officer O’Farrell, the police god (goddess, rather, thought Nan), confirmed it. She brought her folding chair inside the room and sat at the foot of the bed, the way Nan used to do with Tod. Her hands held flashing silver needles attached to a long shapeless yellow something; she knitted and nodded, knitted and nodded. Yes, a charge of Kidnapping had been brought against Nan in Washington State. Yes, the Providence police had been informed of her presence in Rhode Island, which made her a Fugitive from Justice. An anonymous phone call had led them to Swan Point Cemetery. The police had arrived there just ahead of the ambulance; Nan had fainted; they’d found the nitroglycerin on her, assumed a heart attack, and brought her here. Best hospital in Providence County.

  One question Officer O’Farrell couldn’t answer. Why had Gabriel decided to bring charges against Nan? Why (Nan of course didn’t ask her this) hadn’t whatever Alex had on him stopped him—as it had, presumably, all these months since December?

  More
teenagers in lab coats. More blood (Nan looked hastily away) drawn, stethoscopes wielded, bedpans inflicted.

  The papal “we”; the royal “we”; the medical “we.”

  “What would we like today?” Cheerful, motherly, a gray-haired woman in a striped pinafore entered Nan’s room without knocking. “Ladies’ Home Journal? Woman’s Day?” Patting her perfect hair, she regarded Nan’s now ragged head; then her eyes moved downward to take in the tattoo visible above the neckline of her hospital Johnny. “Um … Road & Track?”

  “We’d like a pack of Camels,” Nan said.

  “Oh, we don’t have cigarettes, Mrs., uh, Mmmm. This is a nonsmoking facility.”

  “An orgasm, then.”

  The neat gray head withdrew in alarm.

  That afternoon, Nan finally saw a doctor out of his teens. Not the much-maligned Doctor Ping; someone called Milani. Stifling a yawn (tired? bored?), he pronounced her fit to be arraigned. “Not quite in the pink,” was how he put it, “but not in the red, either. Heh, heh.” She hadn’t had a heart attack, after all—only an “incident.” In the other bed, behind a drawn curtain, the woman Nan had begun to think of as Roomie coughed—a cough she seemed to have acquired that morning in Radiology. It sounded like “Clio! Clio!” “Need I say, take this as a warning?” Milani said, withdrawing the cold coin of his stethoscope from Nan’s cleavage. A magistrate would come to arraign her later, he added. After that, she’d stay in the hospital another day, day and a half, until they’d collected three days’ worth of her blood; then she’d be released into the waiting arms of the Law. “Good luck to you,” Milani said, and left.

  The police came, again, along with the assistant state’s attorney for Providence County, a tall, frowning man in a suit too big for him. Captain Abernathy—the same man she’d seen the day before, courtly and calm-eyed, with a luxuriant mustache—introduced everyone, as if they were all at a business meeting. Nan failed to hear any of their names. She was too busy bracing herself against the questions she knew were coming. She felt their evident concern for Jane; there was even a little kindness toward Nan herself. “Mrs. Mulholland, your position is grave,” Captain Abernathy said. “I can help you. Just tell us where the child is.”