The Year She Disappeared

by Ann Harleman

  Having a lawyer was part of Walker’s plan. She would go with Walker’s plan.

  She sank into the chair indicated by a wave of Jenny Root’s pin-striped arm. At least she didn’t have to do this alone. She did not let herself think of freedom, of the fragrant summer air outside, of Nibbrig’s leafy loft, now so desirable. A hospital room, a cell—what was the difference? You can manage, she told herself.

  “Get those things off her! You wanna be sued? Want that on your record?” The Twit had an unexpectedly deep voice, the sound of a bassoon in the body of a clarinet.

  Sullenly, Officer Blank unlocked Nan’s bellyband and cuffs. Her bent head, under Nan’s chin, smelled like steamed asparagus. Nan failed to repress a shudder.

  “Thank you. Now I’d like a word with my client. Alone.”

  Officer Blank left. Nan regarded her lawyer with the beginnings of interest. A twit with clout.

  “Okay, we don’t have much time, so let’s— How’re you feeling?” Standing on the other side of the scarred wooden table, Jenny Twit seemed to dance in place, waiting for Nan’s answer. Nan could see her instructing herself: Remember to show concern for the client.

  “I’m all right,” Nan said. “Thanks for getting me unchained.”

  “Nada.” Jenny Twit didn’t sit down; Nan had to crane her neck to look up at her. “We’ve got a special hearing even though it’s Saturday night, because of your health. Precarious, jeopardy, yadda yadda yadda. The judge’ll be here in ten, so we gotta cover ground. You don’t keep Overbite Wright waiting. Smoke?”

  The pack of Newport Lights that came skidding across the table glittered in the harsh overhead lights. Nan’s fingers trembled as she took one. Jenny Twit’s match, igniting Nan’s cigarette, seemed to go off in Nan’s brain.

  “Thank you,” she breathed out, in a heady cloud of mentholated smoke.

  But her lawyer was already moving on. She glanced around the room, then threw the spent match onto the floor. Nan’s heart—here was a fellow rule-breaker!—tugged upward. Jenny Root sat down and opened her briefcase and pulled out a yellow legal pad and a pencil. She spoke faster than anyone Nan had ever heard; her nasal, pursed-lips Rhode Island accent took all Nan’s nicotine-enhanced concentration to decipher. They would get bail, tonight. “Your pal Val gave me ten grand up front, good friends you got!— This judge is a mean SOB— Lemme do the talking, don’t answer unless he asks you directly—” Jenny Root’s pencil moved rapidly across her pad as she spoke. “Legally he can’t bully you about your granddaughter’s whereabouts, not at a bail hearing, but he may try anyway, if he does let me take care of it— Unpredictable fucker, we’ll hafta play it by yeah— What? By yeah”—tugging at one pierced lobe—“you know, go with the flow.”

  Setting down her pencil, she reached across the table and grasped Nan’s hand in her small, sweaty one. “Before we start, you gotta level with me. I mean totally. First off, why did you take your granddaughter?”

  She’d never told Val and Mel exactly why she was on the lam, so they hadn’t been able to tell Jenny Root. “My daughter asked me to,” Nan said. She paused, looking down at their joined hands resting on the scarred table.

  “Why?” Jenny Root squeezed Nan’s hand, then released it.

  Nan kept her eyes on the tabletop. Someone had carved into it a crude circle enclosing the words BANG HEAD HERE. She ran both hands through her hair, rubbed her neck. Her wrists hurt where the handcuffs had rubbed them.

  “Why?” Jenny Root repeated.

  “He was— My daughter thought, she was sure, her father was abusing her.”

  “Sexually?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Don’t mention that when we’re in there with Wright. Let me do the talking. Now, the second thing.” Her eyes held Nan’s. “Do you know where your granddaughter is?”

  “No,” Nan said.

  Jenny Root looked at her.

  “I know who she’s with,” Nan admitted. “But I don’t know where they are. Truly I don’t.”

  Another, longer look. “But you could find out.”

  Here it was. On this, Nan could not bend. No matter what Walker’s plan was. “But I won’t,” she said.

  Jenny Root looked at her. She opened her mouth to speak, then thought better of it. Frowning, she made another note on her pad, closed it, and put it back in her briefcase. She began rummaging around in its depths. The artificial quiet of the little room attacked like an undertow, threatening to sweep away Nan’s nicotine high. Nervously she rubbed her aching wrists. “Ms. Root. I have a question of my own. Why did my son-in-law bring charges now?”

  “As opposed to when?” Jenny Root was pulling small objects out of her briefcase, one after another, little plastic cases.

  “Anytime in the last six months. That’s how long Jane and I’ve been living here, in Providence.”

  “No idea.”

  Jenny Root stood up and walked around the table and set a handful of cosmetics in front of Nan. She spat into her palm, then rubbed it vigorously over Nan’s hair. Nan was too surprised to protest. Still talking, Jenny Root snapped open the cosmetics cases and lined them up on the table. “This Wright’s got a heart of anthracite.” She dipped a finger into a pot of blue eyeshadow, ran it under Nan’s eyes. “But, hey—you croak in jail awaiting trial, he’s responsible, there goes his bid for appellate court judge, right down the toilet.” Brownish blush went into the hollows above Nan’s eyes and under her cheekbones; beige lipstick coated her lips. “That’s better; pallor, you need pallor—” She stepped back to view the effect, then moved in close to run a powder puff over Nan’s cheeks. “Precarious, yeah, okay, we’re saying the doctors warned you in Seattle, he won’t have time to check Seattle—What medical condition? Angina? Okay, sounds good, okay, immediate jeopardy, cumulative damage, yadda yadda yadda—”

  Nan found herself rising, moving (being moved, really, by Jenny Root, by a sort of magnetism, apparently, since they weren’t touching) toward the door. Knuckles poised to knock, the younger woman stopped. Gently she removed the cigarette from Nan’s fingers. She dropped it onto the floor and ground it under one shiny black high-heeled shoe.

  “Suck in your cheeks! Slump!” (Nan did not find this hard.) “Totter!”

  Jenny Root put an arm across her shoulders, a quick bracing embrace. Nan’s neck hurt, her wrists ached, she did not feel in the least hopeful. Jenny Root knocked on their side of the door. “Ready!”

  |

  When Alex was seven (in Bucharest, where Tod had disappointingly been posted), she’d had a pet mynah bird. One morning the Rumanian peasant girl who cleaned the apartment had left the cage door open. It must have been open the whole day. But Nan and Tod came home from a reception at the embassy to find the bird a blue-black ball still hunched on the topmost perch just under the cage’s bamboo roof. One eye was cocked doubtfully down at the open door, with its terrifying invitation.

  A Fugitive and a Kidnapper, but out on bail nevertheless, Nan Mulholland hesitated on the steps outside the police station. A warm fish-scented breeze, coming in off the ocean, touched her face. Seagulls circling overhead complained. She began listing the enclosures she’d passed through in the last week, barely emerging into the outside air between one and the next: Deenie’s place, ambulance, hospital, police van, jail. Tears of self-pity invaded her view of an unnamed brick building, a narrow alley. She looked down the street, but Val’s taxi was nowhere to be seen. She pushed her jacket sleeves up above her elbows and sat down on the steps to wait.

  The deepening twilight carried the smells of summer: earth, rain, tree bark. They mingled with the city smells of cinders and car exhaust. Nan felt in her pocket for the pack of cigarettes Jenny Root had put there when they parted. She’d been late for a deposition—on a Saturday night, what a girl!—and had phoned Val to come and get Nan, after setting up a “serious meet” for Monday morning. Nan didn’t have to talk to the police, no grilling about where Jane was, Jenny Root had taken care of that.
You’re free now, you’re exhausted, go home and crash, don’t talk to anybody!

  There were matches tucked into the cellophane, thank you, Jenny Root, Jenny Twit no longer. Nan still wasn’t sure how she’d done it, but somehow tiny Jenny had persuaded Judge Wright—who did indeed have an overbite, weighed a good two hundred and fifty pounds, and was black—to let Nan go. The word precarious had figured prominently in her plea, delivered with majestic slowness in her surprisingly deep voice. The judge, also known as All-Night Wright, had responded with a sonorous series of aphorisms. The only one Nan could remember went, Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, such as when you find a mouse turd in your beer. The charge of kidnapping, set forth in the Washington State warrant, was noted. The fact that Nan had waived extradition was noted. Bail was set at five thousand dollars—Jenny Root having made the point that her client, barely ambulatory, was unlikely to flee—and Nan was free.

  Free.

  She lit a cigarette. She sucked in, felt her rib cage widen, her heart tilt. Exhaling, she watched blue smoke spiral up into the bluer dusk. Somewhere she’d read that people who went blind usually stopped smoking, because so much of the pleasure in it was visual. Free. She’d known—everyone knew—intellectually, that freedom is frightening. Hadn’t the existentialists made that clear, while muddying everything else? (Nan hadn’t come of age in the fifties for nothing.) The hospital, she saw now, had felt safe. No possibilities; no choices. Had she come to rely on those constraints? To crave that safety?

  What would have become of her after a few nights in jail?

  Feeling suddenly much too warm, Nan stretched out her legs, lifting her face to the humid evening. City grit traveled on the light breeze, and she had to rub her eyes. When she opened them, Val’s taxi was at the curb. Mel got out and crossed the sidewalk, running. Her arms were around Nan before she could rise.

  |

  Alone for the first time in days, Nan stood on the threshold of Nibbrig’s loft. Her loft, was how she thought of it now. She didn’t have keys to Deenie’s place, but it didn’t matter. She wanted to be here, in the place where she’d made a home for herself and Jane. Even the bare hallway of Elbow Street, when she’d entered it on Mel’s arm, had felt welcoming. The rubbery smell of rats, the odor of other people’s boiled vegetables, embraced her.

  The celebration painstakingly planned by Mel had fallen flat. It was just the two of them—Val had had to work—and Nan was too tired to eat. Neither of them had much heart for the fortune cookies, or the vodka with a spear of buffalo grass floating upright inside, or even the marijuana. Mel missed Jane, it was clear. She kept getting up and grabbing Zipper, who kept escaping (he was in hiding from a resentful, vengeful Clio). She showed Nan a Barbie costume she’d made—velvet and crinoline and peacock-blue taffeta glue-gunned into a gown vaguely reminiscent of Queen Elizabeth I—and some pop-up books featuring a hippopotamus with one gold tooth. After the joint, Mel thumbed through the books over and over, no longer speaking.

  Now, as Nan moved forward, the heavy metal door closed behind her. Its firm, decisive sound was reassuring—not shutting Nan in, but shutting the rest of the world out. Jenny Root had raised the possibility of hiding Nan somewhere, to save her for a little while from the Press. Nan had refused. Everything in her had said, No. Had said, Home. Meaning this place.

  The sound of seagulls, like the crying of terse babies. The argyle pattern of moonlight pouring through the No-Theft grille onto the wide wood floor. The smells of cinnamon and burned toast. Nan walked into the middle of the room and stood in the freckled shadows cast by the arbor of Nibbrig’s trees and plants. She remembered, vividly, the first few nights she and Jane had spent here, back (so far back, it seemed now) in December: those Sparrow Nights. Across the wide expanse of floor, Jane’s orange-and-yellow screen still stood, concealing all but a corner of her bed. For a moment Nan thought she heard Jane breathing. The sound was so real that she found herself moving across the loft on tiptoe. Slowly, she edged around the screen.

  Moonlight striped Jane’s bed, the army blanket neatly tucked in around the edges, just as Nan had left it when they’d moved in with Walker. The small space was nearly bare. Most of Jane’s things had accompanied them to Walker’s, then gone into the suitcases stowed in his trunk while they had their ill-starred final picnic. Jane’s dresser top held only a couple of Barbie dolls—the lesser favorites—and a secondhand copy of Treasure Island, spurned because it didn’t have enough illustrations (“I can’t hear without pictures,” Jane had whined when Nan read it to her. “The words don’t go.”)

  Nan picked up Miami Getaway Barbie and straightened her pale stork legs. Suddenly trembling, she sat down on Jane’s bed. Her hands, of their own accord, moved across the blanket, smoothing a patch of moonlight over and over. Pop used to say, You don’t know how heavy a burden you’re carrying until you put it down. And wasn’t it (Be honest!) a relief to be alone, after the months of cajoling and disciplining and worrying, of brush-your-teeth-did-you-change-your-underpants-where’s-your-jacket? A relief to be just Nan? To sit in the moonlight, hearing only the distant hum of the freeway, feeling the rough woolen army blanket like a penitent’s hair shirt under her palms? But beneath the relief was longing. Nan ached to feel Jane’s warm weight in her arms, on her lap, anchoring her. Looking down, she found she was clutching Miami Getaway Barbie so hard that its fierce little fingers bit into her palm. All the things she felt glad to be relieved of were also, in the slowly withdrawing moonlight, the things she deeply missed.

  |

  The next day, Sunday, was the seventh of June. Without really expecting any message from Alex—their whole scheme seemed now to belong to another life—Nan found herself once again at the Rock. It was empty now of undergraduates, hot summer sunlight falling through long windows onto Nan’s bent head. Scrolling through the Pee-Eye’s Personals, she felt her heart jerk.

  POOKIE: Working on A plan, Love and Kisses, Everything all Right, stay tuned. HIPPIE

  Surprise followed by relief followed by surprise. Such optimism was wholly unlike Alex—not to mention the love and kisses. Baffled, Nan leaned back in her chair and stared at the blue-lit screen. This message would have been composed before Alex’s late-night visit to Methfessel Memorial, but after she’d come to Providence. Had she been so sure Nan would agree to take Jane away?

  Then, farther down the same column, something else caught Nan’s eye.

  POOKIE: Safe for now. Hope you are too. Trust in God. Who else? HIPPIE

  Now Nan was even more puzzled. Why would Alex send two messages? Was the second intended to cancel the first? She copied both messages onto a piece of paper begged from Ben Kingsley.

  Outside the library she found a dew-dappled bench shaded by locust trees and, throwing her unneeded sweater over the damp wood, sat down and lit a cigarette. Smoke unfurled into the sweet morning air. She smoothed out the piece of paper in her hand and read the two messages, first in order, then reversed. Something tugged at a corner of her mind. Something she couldn’t quite see; something about the way the two messages had looked on the page.

  Flinging her half-smoked cigarette into the wet grass, not stopping to pick up her sweater, Nan ran back up the cement ramp into the Rock. Into the Reference Room, log on, call up the Pee-Eye, yes, there it was. Working on A plan, Love and Kisses, Everything all Right, stay tuned. The “Love and Kisses” coming in the middle of the message; the odd capitalization. Having begged another piece of paper from Ben Kingsley, and a pencil as well (hers was in the pocket of her sweater), Nan copied down the words in the first message that began with capital letters. Working, A, Love, Kisses, Everything, Right. W, A, L, K, E, R.

  The first message wasn’t from Alex; it was from Walker.

  Joy filled her, a ravishing lightness, the sense of her buttocks leaving the chair, the fear that she might bump her head on the high beamed ceiling of the Reference Room. Walker. Scornful as he’d been of Alex’s message system, he’d remembered it,
right down to the childhood nicknames. Resourceful man! Forgiving him, completely, for everything—for his deception about Deenie’s will (wasn’t that just the flip side of his planfulness?), for the ill-conceived Last Picnic (wasn’t that the flip side of his optimism?)—Nan walked slowly out of the library and back under the locust trees to retrieve her sweater. It was the same bench, she realized, where she’d sat six months ago, despairing, after searching fruitlessly for a first message from Alex. How alone she’d felt, back then. She remembered the January thaw, the trees dripping onto the back of her neck, the false scent of spring. Now, too restless to sit still, she tied her sweater around her waist and set off down College Hill toward the river. She would walk home. She could walk, she felt now, all the way to Genoa.

  The day shone clean as silk. Unseen birds in the trees along Angell Street sent spirals of sound—tuneful, hopeful—into the clear air. In the distance the river gleamed. Oh, day—thought Nan—oh, beautiful day.

  At the bottom of the hill she hesitated, then turned right onto Benefit Street. Deenie’s door; Walker’s door. She went up the steps, expecting against all reason that, as it had that first time, the door would open. Of course, it didn’t. Nan had no key—she and Walker had never gotten around to exchanging keys. She stood with one hand on the lion’s head knocker, feeling the hot metal, the sun warm on the top of her head. Small birds scuffled in the laurel bushes beside the steps. She wondered, briefly, about Deenie’s parakeets; but Walker—provident Walker—would have made some provision for them. As he was doing at this very moment for her, Nan.

  A Damsel in Distress, for sure. D in D indeed. How Deenie would have scoffed!