The Year She Disappeared

by Ann Harleman

  “His grandfather,” Mel said. “Died in the camps. It was right before Stalin croaked. If he just could’ve made it three more weeks …”

  Val didn’t return. After a long marijuana-laced silence, Mel began to talk. Janey’s laugh; Janey’s birthmark, like a bird’s wing, on the side of her neck; the way Janey said, “Nyet—not yet!” The longing in Mel’s voice made Nan think of the word bereft. Made her understand what until then she’d only dimly perceived: Jane was Mel’s chance at repair. In fact, Nan realized, sitting there on Mel’s floor in the rosy lamplight, Jane seemed to be everyone’s chance at repair. Mel’s; Gabe’s; Alex’s. Nan’s own. How many pasts could one small child heal?

  |

  June 21. The solstice: the word echoed in Nan’s head as she pushed open, perhaps for the last time, the heavy glass door of the Rock. The longest day of the year, the day when summer seemed eternal, a season you could never leave.

  Against Jenny Root’s instructions, she’d come out by herself this afternoon—she’d had to—crawling out a ground-floor window into the alley behind Fred Street, an exit that Val had showed her. She wore a black wool hat of Mel’s that completely covered her hair, a pair of mirrored sunglasses, and a workman’s jacket provided by Val that said NARRAGANSETT ELECTRIC COMPANY front and back.

  She found Walker’s message first, sandwiched between LOOK HERE, WILMA (a persistent guy! thought Nan) and BABES, READ THIS.

  POOKIE: Can carry out original plan. Await your instructions, printed here, any day. Everyone fine & walking. HIPPIE

  Nan copied out the message. Walking: definitely a communication from Walker. But what did it mean? In the Sunday-morning hush of the Reference Room, empty except for Nan and Ben Kingsley, she pondered. Original plan. That must mean that Walker would take Jane to New Zealand. All Nan had to do was put a message in the Pee-Eye on July 7—two weeks from now—saying, Do it.

  New Zealand. Nine thousand miles from here.

  She was so shaken that she nearly missed Alex’s message, one column over from Walker’s and almost next to it.

  POOKIE: Ti prego di aspettare e non disturbarti. Ti prego di capiscere, Mama. HIPPIE

  Nan’s hand shook so much that she could barely copy down the words. Long forgotten, still beautiful, they fell onto her yellow legal pad like the petals of a pressed flower. Slowly, uncertainly—it had been so long! almost thirty years—she translated. Please wait, and don’t worry. Please understand, Mama.

  Alex had gone to Italy.

  Nan must have turned pale, because Ben Kingsley appeared at her side with a paper cone of water. Gratefully, she drank. It was cold and sweet. Alex had used the wrong word for “worry”; it should have been preoccuparti. She thanked the librarian, who was already retreating toward the safety of his wide, curving counter.

  Italy.

  New Zealand.

  |

  Dusk.

  The darkening air held the clarity of midsummer. Walking along the river, wrapped in the blessed anonymity provided by the Narragansett Electric Company’s blue jacket, Nan tried to remember what Walker had said. Sunset; twilight; dusk. Was that the order they came in? She imagined his arm linked through hers. I wouldn’t be afraid, she thought, if he were here. Behind the State House a brightness the color of pomegranates lingered in the western sky, and gulls circled the white dome.

  Mama: Alex had called her Mama. Alex had gone back to where, in a sense, all this had started. Back into the past, thought Nan, the way we all want to do, the way no one can. To repair? To understand? Or just headlong, instinctual flight?

  Please understand, her message had said. Please accept, was what she meant. But that had been Tod’s gift, not Nan’s: to accept without needing to understand. A gift that had kept him a second-rank diplomat.

  Nan turned onto College Street and began to walk uphill. On her right was the rosy brick building that housed the superior court, where, in three weeks, her fate would be decided. At the Pre-Trial Hearing the judge would ask where Jane was, invoking the pious phrase she’d come to hate, the words so readily twisted into the opposite of their meaning: What’s best for the child. He would not be pleased with Nan’s answer. But it wasn’t only the judge she feared. There would be Gabriel, with his new haggardness, his face riven by grief. Jenny Root had warned her that the state’s attorney would want him present, he made such a credible plaintiff. Suppose he showed only his sorrow. Would pity weaken her? Would she (Mel’s word) cave? Don’t think of him as your son-in-law, Jenny Root had said. Think of him as your enemy. Dick-nose! was Mel’s assessment; Pusbag! How had it come to this? How had she, Nan, come to be what she now was: a woman in late middle age facing a criminal trial, cut off from everyone she loved, everyone who loved her?

  Best for the child. Not wanting to go home, savoring her momentary freedom from reporters, Nan kept walking uphill in the direction of the university. A skateboard careened toward her, two figures on it facing each other. Nan pressed her back against a telephone pole as it swept by. The girl’s legs were stretched out on top of the boy’s; her bare feet clasped his buttocks. Wistfully, Nan turned to watch them. All the way down the hill, people on the sidewalk leapt out of its way. The beauty of the evening—the warm, still air, the lessening light—seemed to hold a sense of something lost. Sweat tickled Nan’s forehead. She unzipped the Narragansett Electric Company’s jacket. At the bottom of the hill the skateboarders melted into the long indigo shadow of the courthouse.

  Best for the child. At the top of College Street Nan paused before the university’s high iron fence. Her fingers curled around the bars of the Van Wickle gate. The Judge (whoever that might be) could decide Nan’s fate; but only Nan could decide Jane’s. She had two weeks before Walker would look for her answer in the Pee-Eye. Two weeks to decide. If she said Yes, Walker would go to New Zealand with Jane. If she said Wait, he would wait. Either way, Jane was her responsibility.

  Nan remembered that December morning on Alex’s deck, Alex’s eyes dark with hope, the Yes that had come from Nan’s own lips. She thought, I did not mean to give so great a gift.

  The streetlights came on, making darkness gather around her and crowd in underneath the Van Wickle Gate’s great stone arch. Overhead, gulls moved through the last of the light, weaving, over and over, the symbol for infinity. Best! Best! they seemed to cry.

  |

  The next day, Monday, Nan and Jenny Root met to discuss Strategy. Skinny Jenny, in a big-shouldered black linen suit that made her look as if she’d raided her mother’s closet, had dark circles under her eyes, and her deep voice sounded raspy. She was pleased that Nan had heeded her previous admonitions, had not spoken to the Press or to Gabriel; but she was puzzled that Gabriel hadn’t tried to contact Nan.

  “Maybe when we get his deposition, we’ll see. Hey, you sure stonewalled Jamison Leer. He’s a real tricky dick, I told you he worked on von Bulow’s defense back when he was in private practice. You were way posh!”

  Leer, the state’s attorney, had badgered Nan, as had the police, full of disconcertingly genuine concern for Jane.

  Jenny Root rifled through her briefcase, came up with a sheaf of yellow paper that she fanned across the conference table. First they disposed of the matter of character witnesses. Deenie dead; friends in Seattle too far away. (“No minister? Counselor? Nobody with spine?”) Morosely, Jenny Root considered Val and Mel, a non-citizen of doubtful employment and a tattoo artist. She finally agreed to audition Mel but rejected Val as too risky. (“Gnarly” was her word.) A local shrink—a counter-shrink, to balance the one the state’s attorney would inevitably call—would testify to Nan’s all-around mental health and stability. “But”—resignation tolled in her voice like church bells—“I’m gonna have to put you on the stand.”

  Talking faster than ever, she established that their (their?) defense could only be Jane’s welfare, the Best Interest of the Child, but that this would have to be handled very delicately.

  “You don’t, we don’t, hav
e any proof that your son-in-law abused his daughter.”

  A father’s bathrobe untied; nightmares; a little girl’s too-intent reliance on attention from the men in her life. All this had already been mentioned, and Jenny Root had understood; but all of it was oblique. Suggestive, but not conclusive. “Right,” Nan said wearily. “No proof.”

  The whine of the fax machine in the outer office echoed, Proof! Proof!

  “So. Let’s run through it one more time. When the other side deposes you, you don’t get into specifics. You just say you were concerned for your granddaughter’s welfare. Her mother was very worried. Her mother asked you to take her for a while, you were coming back East to visit an old friend anyway, yadda yadda yadda. You didn’t know the child’s father hadn’t been consulted.”

  Nan nodded. Through the conference room windows, the bright June morning seemed like a series of paintings hung above the shelves of lawbooks.

  “We don’t cast any aspersions, okay? We just gotta hope that Gabriel does something or says something, makes himself look doubtful. No mudslinging. You’re just a K.O.G. Kindly old granny. The more like a K.O.G. you look (remind me to talk to you about your Look), the more likely the judge’ll be to bypass Gabriel and give Jane to you.”

  Give Jane to me.

  Nan must have looked doubtful, because Jenny Root, running her fingers (nails bitten, Nan noticed, to the quick) through her porcupine hair, stopped short. “Nan. You don’t have to go through with this if you don’t want to. We can still plead out.”

  Nan said, as if this were the only obstacle, “I don’t know where she is.”

  “But you know who she’s with. That’d be enough for the police to find her. All you have to do is give them a name.”

  Nan was silent, looking through the windows behind Jenny Root’s head, where a breeze stirred the painted-looking trees.

  “You may be thinking that I want you to turn your granddaughter in.” (Nan had been thinking exactly that.) “Well, I don’t. Not per se. I just want you to save yourself. You’re my first responsibility, Nan. Not Jane. You.”

  A warming tide of self-pity washed through Nan, and she had to fold her hands tightly on the polished table. Who else cared about her now? Walker was taking care of Jane. Alex had gotten Nan into this situation in the first place, and then had abandoned her. It isn’t my choice, Nan thought for the hundredth time in the last two weeks. I didn’t choose this.

  “A name, Nan. Easy! Just a name. And you can walk out of here and never come back.”

  It would be easy. Easier than Jenny Root knew. Nan hadn’t mentioned the possibility of reaching Walker through a message in the Pee-Eye. July 7 was only thirteen days away.

  Jenny Root reached over and put a hand on her arm. “The person she’s with—they wouldn’t necessarily get in trouble. We could negotiate that.”

  Nan moved her hand away, wrapped both arms around her rib cage. What am I thinking? She shook her head violently. “No,” she said.

  Jenny Root sighed. Even her sighs were faster than other people’s, quick little puffs. Nan longed to lay her head down on the cool, gleaming surface of the conference table. To fall asleep amid the drifts of yellow paper and wake up somewhere else. Somewhere far away.

  “… and you don’t mention the word sexual,” Jenny Root was saying. “You don’t mention the word abuse. Stick to the positive. Welfare. Best interest.”

  The sweet-faced male secretary padded softly into the room and laid a note by Jenny Root’s elbow. She read it in a single quick look.

  “Okay, that’s it for now, you’ll be deposed on Monday, Tuesday at the latest, call and lemme know how it went, you got my cell number, my beeper? We can modify if we need to, it’s not set in gold, didn’t get to your look, Max’ll explain what you gotta do for your look, right, Max? Okay, I’m outta here. I’m archives.”

  |

  Plead out. Nan rejected the thought; yet it stayed with her. The Thought, she began calling it, to herself: something that hovered, throwing its shadow wherever she went, like a large, dingy dirigible low in the sky.

  |

  Val cranked down the driver’s-side window with angry thrusts. The river smell rushed in, carrying rumors of the unseen ocean. A camera with NEWS 10 on the side glided rashly toward them.

  Val stuck his head out the window. “Fucking cocksuckers!” Cokesackers, it came out; but close enough.

  He stepped on the gas and drove up over the curb straight at the hapless cameraman, who jumped into a doorway. The camera swayed on its long legs, then toppled. It hit the pavement with a loud crash. Val’s spittle slid down its side.

  “Ha!” he cried. “When thunder growls, a man will cross himself!”

  His own camera was out the open window. Nan could hear it clicking—more drive-by shootings—as they bumped down off the sidewalk, Val steering one-handed. She shut her eyes and clung to the back of the seat in front of her. They sped off into the hot, wet morning.

  In the backseat next to Nan, Mel read aloud from a piece of paper. “HAIR: neat, not too long or short, not obviously dyed. Recommended salon: Hair and Now, 722 Hope Street.” She snorted. “APPAREL: suitable for church service, non-funeral. Men: dark suit w/tie in subdued pattern. Women: skirted suit or dress in dark color; no prints, no pants; heels, low to medium; flesh-colored stockings. Ugh! Geriatric! Hat, optional. Well, there’s a break. TO BE AVOIDED AT ALL COSTS: flashy jewelry; piercings other than ears (one hole); tattoos—you’re cooked, Nan!—red lipstick (women); facial hair (men). So a Bearded Lady would be okay.”

  She tossed the paper—given to Nan by Max, Jenny Root’s secretary, two days before—onto the floor and threw her head back against the cracked vinyl upholstery. “Crap sandwich! I can’t believe I’m gonna help you do this to yourself.”

  A syrupy summer rain coated the city. Gradually, still muttering an occasional Chort!, Val slowed to ordinary speeding. They crossed the river and turned onto South Main, headed for the consignment store where they’d gone in the winter, when Nan had first come to Providence. Jane had been with her, she remembered wistfully, looking out at the gray morning. They’d been outfitting themselves for—it seemed now—an adventure.

  Mel must have read her mind, because she sighed. “Janey looked so cool in that little red jacket. Super-fly. Not a true red, more of a blue-red. Caput mortuum red, did you know there’s a color called that? ‘Head of the dead,’ it means. Dead-head red.”

  Val said, “Janechka I miss. Both two of us, Mel and me, we miss. What to hell!” The taxi hit a pothole, bounded out of it. “Chort voz’mi!”

  Nan twisted around to look out the back window. No one seemed to be following them; for the moment, at least, they were Pressless. She retrieved Max’s list from the floor and smoothed it out. The Make-Under, Mel had christened this project: a makeover that left you worse off than when you started. She’d refused to have any part in it, until Nan pointed out that it was for Jane’s sake. The duller and safer she, Nan, appeared, the more likely the judge would be to believe her.

  Val dropped them off on Hope Street, camera clicking as they climbed out of the car. “Good-bye, my loveds!” he said. “Tender ladies!”

  As they went from place to place, the morning lightened. The rain stopped. Clouds began moving east toward the ocean; the sun appeared, wan as an invalid, and made the rain-wet pavement steam. Mel kept drawing poignant parallels with their makeover excursion in February—Four months ago! Nan thought in astonishment—when Nan had acquired the look she was now at such pains to lose. It made her feel split between the present and past, as if she were living through two mornings at once.

  In the consignment store’s rickety, hot little dressing room she felt suddenly dizzy. Maybe it was just from so much looking at herself in mirrors: somewhere in the last few months she’d lost the habit of self-regard (Be honest! of self-admiration) that had sustained her through a lifetime. The full-length mirror, less than a foot away, showed a woman she hardly knew. Truly terrible
hair (white roots, band of faded blue, the cut grown out to a yaklike puff); unmade-up eyes; untended, dry, old lady skin.

  Mel pounded on the door. “Let’s see!”

  Hastily Nan pulled on the clothes the shop owner had produced in response to Max’s list. Charcoal-gray linen jacket, suitably boxy; matching skirt that fell below Nan’s knees; white blouse with demure collar. Without looking in the mirror again, she opened the door and stepped out.

  Mel took her in with curled lip, then clapped a hand to her forehead. “That really rocks!” she said. “That is so special.”

  Behind her hovered the shop owner, a pale woman with a large jaw and soft dark eyes, like a very pretty cow. She said, in a voice that matched her eyes, “It needs a little something.”

  Mel snorted. The woman went up to the front of the shop and came back with a dark-red plaid ribbon. She tied it in a neat bow around Nan’s neck under her collar. Nan stood quietly under her hands, which smelled of lavender.

  “There,” Cow Eyes said, giving a last twitch to the bow. “Perfect!”

  “Propagandistic!” crooned Mel, in a cruel parody of the woman’s tone.

  She didn’t seem to notice. “I’ve got just the shoes,” she said. Another trip to the front of the store, from which she returned carrying a pair of gray-and-white pumps. She stood waiting, bovinely attentive, while Nan wedged her bare feet into them.

  “Of course they’ll look a lot better with stockings.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Mel. “Woolen ones, doncha think? A nice argyle pattern.”

  This time Cow Eyes got it. Looking hurt, she retreated behind the counter. “Let me know if you need further assistance,” she said.