The Year She Disappeared

by Ann Harleman

  Nan turned and began to walk back along Benefit Street to Angell and the river. Alex’s actual message—the second of the two messages—surfaced in her mind. “Safe for now. Hope you are too. Trust in God. Who else?” A black cat streaked across the brick pavement in front of her and she remembered how Alex, when she was little, used to say that cats had too many legs when they ran. Alex was as much a feminist as Deenie, and then some; yet hadn’t her life with Gabriel been as full of Little Red Waitinghood as lives come? Perhaps it had caused her pain, the discrepancy between what she believed and how she lived; Nan didn’t know, because she’d never asked. Trust in God. She had no idea what that meant. As far as she knew, Alex was an atheist, as Tod had been—certainly, since the age of sixteen, a resolutely lapsed Catholic. Did her message mean that she’d given up, or that she’d reached some sort of larger understanding?

  I don’t really know Alex at all.

  Nan paused at the apex of the arched footbridge across the river—the same bridge, completed now, where she and Walker had first kissed. Squinting sideways, she could almost see his pelican profile, feel his hip bump hers, hear him whistling.

  If there’s anything that you want

  If there’s anything I can do

  He would not phone, she knew. He would think it was too dangerous. Ditto, phoning Val again. (Oh, she felt inside Walker’s head now—that close to him. When had this happened? Why hadn’t she noticed it before now?) He would keep to Alex’s message schedule, would remember it though Nan had mentioned it only once, just as he’d remembered about Pookie and Hippie. Yes—he’d keep to Alex’s schedule, the seventh and twenty-first of each month, knowing that Nan would check the Pee-Eye.

  She leaned on the wall and looked down into the water, green like old glass, but moving. She could smell the sea. Midday strollers—lovers, children, old women in wavering pairs—passed back and forth across the bridge. The murmurous, gleaming water, the still air, the sky polished to a deep summer blue—these were what she had right now. She took the comfort they offered and went home.

  |

  Advice and warnings.

  The next morning Nan made her way to the Blackstone Boulevard office of Jenny Root. At first glance the calligraphic sign on the bright green lawn seemed to read MCCLOSKEY, GERONIMO & TOILET. If Jenny Root was, as Val claimed, the Providence Russian underworld’s attorney of choice, why didn’t her name appear in gilded curls alongside those of McCloskey, Giannino, and Follett? But inside, there was no time for questions; only answers. Only advice and warnings.

  Dressed in black leather, Jenny Root brought the cold in with her. The weather had turned in the night, and rain glazed the arched windows of the reception area. Chilled, Nan felt her nipples tighten inside her summer shirt, under her poncho. Jenny led her into a conference room whose walls and ceiling were decorated with intricate pastel moldings, like a wedding cake. She took off her motorcycle helmet and ran a hand over her cropped hair. Her leather jacket smelled of animal; amplified by the rain, it made Nan think of lambing time, in spring, in Rumania. She put her helmet upside down on the shining mahogany conference table, where it sat like a soup tureen.

  They took their places at one end of the long table. The chairs were too big; Nan skidded from side to side on the leather seat, feeling like a little girl. The room’s reverent silence was threaded with business sounds (ringing phone, fluting female voices) from beyond the paneled door. It reminded Nan of the undertaker’s office, when she’d buried Tod. What was his name, something so silly she’d had to fight the urge to giggle.

  Jenny Root, suited up for court (“Got a trial at ten, so let’s not dick around”), was very angry. In her fury, she talked even faster than she had on Saturday night at the police station. Nan didn’t interrupt with questions, just gleaned what she could. Tod’s dead face kept interposing itself between her and Jenny Root, the closed eyes large and oval in their sockets, like eggs. Apparently Nan had committed crimes in both Washington and Rhode Island, but not the same crimes. In Washington, it was Kidnapping; in Rhode Island, Fugitive from Justice. But pressure had been brought to bear. Gabriel had influence that extended all the way across the country. Rhode Island—anxious to show that when it came to crime its heart, if not its mayor, was in the right place—had adopted the Washington State charge of Kidnapping as its own.

  Jenny Root slapped the table. “Goddammit! Who is he, this son-in-law of yours? This never happens. You’re just supposed to be detained here until the extradition hearing. Then, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, they ship you back to the other state.”

  Nan must have looked as terrified by that idea as she felt, because Jenny Root paused. She ran a hand over her short, thick hair and signed. “Okay, we got a coupla problems, we can smother ’em in the bud, let’s dope out our strategy.”

  Our?

  “Problem Number One. There’s gonna be a feeding frenzy in the media. You been contacted yet? Humph. Maybe they don’t know where you are, but they’ll find out. A missing kid, everybody’s heart bleeds. Don’t talk to the press. No newspapers, no magazines, no TV. Nada. Got it?”

  Maybe Nan looked skeptical, because Jenny Root leaned forward and said, slowly for her, “Yeah, okay, I’m young. But I’m good. First in my class at Tufts, Law Review, superior court clerkship, yadda yadda yadda. Okay?” She waited for Nan’s nod. While she was speaking, her fury had shifted into a kind of joyful ferocity—because, Nan guessed, she now had an interesting case to deal with. She went on, “Okay. Now, we got lucky with Wright. Next time we might not be. So, Problem Number Two. The state’s attorney may try to grill you. They’re supposed to leave you alone once you have a lawyer, but a lot of times they don’t. You’ve got the right to walk away. Just blow ’em off. And don’t say Word One about abuse. Okay? That way, when it comes to trial, we can surprise ’em. Good. Problem Number Three. Don’t talk to your son-in-law.”

  “Gabriel? I don’t even know where he is. How could I talk to him?”

  “He’ll be around. Didn’t he come to the hospital?”

  Nan nodded.

  “You think he won’t come to your apartment, too? He’ll try to get you alone. Try to get you to feel sorry for him. Figuring, if he can’t make you cave, make you turn his daughter—Jane, right?—over to him, well, hey, maybe you’ll let something drop. Some clue. Then he can figure out where she is and go get her. If he finds her, we’re toast. If he’s got her with him, no judge on this planet’s gonna give her to you.”

  Give her to me?

  Jenny Root paused, looked at Nan. “And you can still go to jail.”

  Sudden funereal hush. What was that undertaker’s name?

  “The charges’d still hold. Your son-in-law—Gabriel?—even if Gabriel dropped the charges, the State of Rhode Island has an interest in Jane’s welfare now. They could still prosecute. Nan? Are we on the same page?”

  In the outer office a fax machine began its low, soothing hum. In the coffin Tod’s face hadn’t looked like Tod, the forehead smoothed free of pain. No one had seemed to notice this but Nan.

  Jenny Root put a hand under Nan’s chin, made Nan’s eyes meet hers. Eyes narrowed, face aglow with logic, she said, “Don’t see him. You don’t need to see him. I’ll depose him, yadda yadda yadda, we’ll know what he has in mind. Till then, blow him off.”

  Nan nodded. Nod, nod, nod. Gabriel would be visibly suffering; defiant, yet defensive. Tears in his silver eyes. (Depression is the better part of valor, Walker had said once.) What could Jenny Root—probably all of twenty-six years old—know about the tears of men?

  “Problem Number Four. The biggie. How’re we gonna plead?”

  What do you mean we, white man?

  “We’ve got three options. Guilty. Not guilty. Or nolo contendere—no contest—that’s if we plead out.”

  “Plead out?”

  “Strike a bargain. You give them Jane; they give you you.”

  “No,” Nan said.

  Silence. Then a sigh
from Jenny Root. “Wounded bird, right?”

  “What?”

  “You wanna lead them away from the nest, from where your fledgling is hidden. That’s why you refused extradition, right?” Jenny Root’s voice mingled exasperation with admiration. “You’re willing to go to jail to keep everybody tied up here until Jane makes her getaway.”

  Nan stared down at her reflection in the polished mahogany surface of the conference table. When she’d refused extradition she hadn’t been thinking of Jane—only of not going back to Gabriel’s city. It had been her own safety, not Jane’s, that she’d cared about.

  Mistaking Nan’s chagrin for modesty, Jenny Root put a hand on her shoulder. “You are posh, you know that? But it’s my duty to keep you out of jail. You could be found guilty. You really could. I’m good—I’m fuckin’ kick-ass—but, shit, it’s your life we’re talking about here. Let’s not dick around.”

  Nan said, “I can’t give Jane to Gabriel. I can’t.” I can’t keep her, either. What in hell am I doing?

  “If you go to jail, you won’t see your granddaughter for years. She’ll have to live with whoever she’s with now. Okay, I don’t know who that is, but do they love her the way you do? She’ll be with them. Not with her mother, or her father, or you. Think, Nan. Is that really what you want? Is that really best for the child?”

  Best for the child. Best for the child. Was Jenny Root advising her to give Jane up? Why? Was it because that was best for Jenny? Her best chance—maybe her only chance—to win? Nan felt as if she’d been catapulted back into the world of the Foreign Service: hidden motives, secrecy, lies. Where there was no one, even on your own side, that you could truly rely on. Where trust was a luxury forever beyond your means. She shook her head, to clear it. She mustn’t—couldn’t afford to—confuse the present with the past. It was true that Walker was no blood kin to Jane. But he did love her, and Jane loved him. Nan trusted that. Had to trust it.

  She looked up at Jenny Root. “You’re right,” she said. “It’s my life. Mine, not yours. I know you’re doing your best for me, and I appreciate it. It’s my decision.”

  “You won’t give her up? You’re sure?”

  Nodding, Nan thought, Now ask me whether I’m sure I can keep her.

  But Jenny Root began shuffling papers into her briefcase. “Okay, so we’ll enter a plea of Not Guilty. The child’s mother arranged for her to go with you, you were just being a helpful granny, yadda yadda yadda.” She sounded as if she were agreeing with Nan, though Nan had suggested no plea.

  Muggleton—that was the undertaker’s name. A. Lincoln Muggleton. Deenie saying, Now what in the world could that ‘A’ stand for?

  Jenny Root stood up, shrugged on her jacket, put her helmet on her head and gave it a settling tap. She looked like an underage storm trooper. “One, no media; two, no Gabriel; three, take the Fifth with the state’s attorney; four, Not Guilty; five, fuck, didn’t get to that, gotta work on your look. Next time. Friday at, let’s see, eleven. Okay? Okay. I’m outta here, I’m history.”

  Her hand grasped Nan’s; then she was gone. The heavy carved wooden door slammed behind her. Seconds later, it opened again.

  “We’ve been lucky so far. Don’t push it. She’s his daughter—don’t forget that. Because he won’t.”

  She disappeared.

  Nan re-fastened her poncho, which there hadn’t been time to take off. A sweet-faced male secretary showed her out. She started down the slate path, picking her way carefully over its rain-glazed surface. Jenny Root’s motorcycle was a black spot at the end of Waterman Street.

  His daughter?

  For the first time, Nan understood that she no longer thought of Jane that way. Jane was her granddaughter, period. Jane was hers.

  Thirteen

  Now Nan Mulholland entered a period of waiting more intense and bleaker than any in her life so far. Little Red Waitinghood didn’t begin to cover it.

  First they had to wait for something called the pretrial hearing. A judge talked to the lawyers for both parties—Nan, the Defendant, the Accused, was one party; the other was Gabriel in conjunction with the State of Rhode Island—and decided whether the case merited a trial. If so, the judge would first try to get the parties to settle the matter without putting taxpayers to the expense of one. If they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, the judge would assign what Jenny Root called a Date Certain. After that, they could begin waiting for the trial itself.

  Nan had always believed that she knew all about waiting. The years behind the Iron Curtain—first in Rumania, then in Poland—had been filled with waiting. Waiting in bureaucratic offices for visas; waiting in lines outside stores for bread or milk or vodka (though—Be honest!— that waiting had nearly always been done by servants); waiting for taxis, waiting for security clearances, waiting for the ambassador to summon her and Tod to dinner. There was the waiting, no matter where they were stationed, to see whether Tod would once again be passed over. Then the waiting to see where the downward spiral of his career would land them next. And of course the happier waiting—a pleasant buzz, like too much champagne at an embassy reception—for the current lover to call, to come to her.

  Yes: Nan was practiced in the art of waiting. So she’d thought until now, in the long, lush days of June, in this down-at-heel city that had somehow become home. Always before, however long or tension-filled the wait, she had been surrounded by those who loved her. Tod; Alex; the current lover. Their closeness had been her safety.

  Now there was neither closeness nor safety. Tod dead; Walker in hiding; Alex who knew where. And Jane. Nan was surprised at how much she missed her. Heartache—that old cliché, an idea Nan had always dismissed, the way she’d dismissed her lovers—was a faint but literal ache, she was discovering now. Not in the foreground, but always there, like a train in the distance going endlessly by.

  They received a date for the pretrial hearing. The fourteenth of July—nearly a month away. Bastille Day. The day on which, every year, the Foreign Service postings had been announced. The day on which, in Paris shortly before Alex was born, Nan and Tod had walked hand in hand beneath huge red banners to see the fireworks above the Seine.

  Mel did her best to distract Nan. They went to the gym every day, pacing adjacent treadmills in the late-afternoon light. Mel cracked jokes. How do you get a man to do sit-ups? Put the TV remote between his toes. She pointed out the best T-shirts: I’M JUST BETTER THAN YOU. I’M SHIPSHAPE—PADDLE HARDER. Afterward, in the sauna, shawled in hot, fragrant steam, she laid a towel across Nan’s shoulders with little daughterly pats.

  On most nights Nan had dinner with Val and Mel. The three of them sat on cushions on the floor, surrounded by take-out cartons under the rosy-shaded lamp, while outside the summer evenings lengthened, softened, filled with the smell of rain-wet earth and flowering trees. Afterward, though—no matter how late she stayed—there was always the moment when she had to enter the empty loft, with its dim checkerboard of streetlight or moonlight, its faint smell of brick dust, its absence of Jane. Jane in a corner making flowers out of Kleenex and wire, the floor around her a drift of pink and blue and yellow. Jane setting Zipper’s empty bowl upside down on her head: “Now I’m an army person!” Jane unrolling a ball of yellow yarn given to her by Mel and stringing it all around the loft, from one piece of furniture to another, to make a giant spiderweb.

  Then the Press found Nan.

  Pretrial discovery—the collecting of statements to the police that became, to Jenny Root’s disgust, a matter of public record—was what triggered it. She didn’t offer to show Nan the statements made by the prosecution’s witnesses, and Nan didn’t ask to see them. (Fear of her own compassion for Gabriel? Or of what he might have said about her?) What seemed to captivate the Press was the fact that the kidnapping charge in Washington State had been adopted by Rhode Island without any inquiry—the result, according to Jenny Root, of Gabriel’s appearance in person before the state’s attorney and of his standing in his own community. The
charge of Kidnapping held a special appeal for readers, according to the nasal-voiced reporter on whom Nan hung up first. In the beginning, she kept on answering the phone, thinking it might somehow be Walker. Mel drilled her in responses to her implacable callers. I have to hang up, my head’s on fire … Whoops! There goes the baby off the fridge … I know you’re a front for the White Aryan Nation. They called, like telemarketers, at mealtimes; they called in the middle of the night. They drove Nan to stop answering the phone at all and, in the end, to unplug it with such force that she tore the jack from the wall.

  After a few days of phonelessness, a reporter turned up at the entrance to Elbow Street one evening as Nan was coming out. The man was small, dark, wily. Nan’s stomach leapt; her first thought was that Gabriel had sent him. Trembling, she pulled out the can of Mace Val had given her and held it pointed at his face in the blue dusk. He backed away. She ducked inside the building, pursued by shouted questions. Is it true you kidnapped a child? Where is she now? She’d gone from being a Fugitive from Justice to being a Fugitive from the Media.

  That night, jittery, afraid to stay in the loft alone, she went down to Val and Mel’s. When they’d heard the whole story, Val announced that from now on he would be driving Nan everywhere. “But I hardly ever go out,” Nan said. Now that she was once again Nan Mulholland, she could use the money in her Seattle bank account and her IRA to live on; with no modeling (which, absurdly, she missed) and no Jane, she would need to leave the building only for legal stuff. Well, when she did, Val insisted, he would escort her. In vain Nan pointed out that here, unlike the former Soviet Union, the press was not a Party organ. That harassment was the price of freedom. “They are ess-holes!” Val shouted. “K chortu!” He’d seen, he reminded Nan, the marks left by the handcuffs on her wrists the night she got out on bail. Mel, from her cushion on the floor, silently handed him a joint. Without putting it to his lips he passed it to Nan, then got up and went into his studio. When he came back he handed her a small, bent black-and-white photograph. The young man in it, with cropped hair and a square, shadowed jaw, wore no visible clothing. Bony shoulders; clavicle. The photo cut him off just above the nipples; across one armpit was the number 2054. He looked directly at the viewer out of eyes that offered no compromise. Val left the photograph in Nan’s hands and went back into his studio and closed the door.