The Year She Disappeared

by Ann Harleman

  Nan threw Mel a reproachful look. “I’ll take everything,” she told the woman. “Thank you for your help.”

  Outside, walking up Hope Street in the weak sunshine while rain steamed off the pavement, Mel said, “Those shoes. Why’re they two-tone? Bizarre-oh! Like fifties convertibles.”

  “They’re called spectator pumps.” Nan lifted her face to the moist air, growing warmer as they walked. “They used to be considered the height of chic. When I was, come to think of it, your age.”

  “Oh, chic,” Mel said. “Right. Listen, while you were in the dressing room getting in touch with your Inner Rotarian, I checked out the neighborhood. How about lunch at an Indian place, before we hit the Salon for the Terminally Blue-Haired?”

  So they lunched, like any two women shopping. Mother and daughter, the diminutive proprietor clearly believed them to be; and when he set down the steaming plates of chicken saag and puffy golden bread, Nan thought of Alex. How seldom they had sat over lunch (Alex used her lunch hours for meetings or to catch up on paperwork), except for the year after Tod died, when Nan had been unexpectedly glad, for a little while, of her daughter’s steadiness, so like his.

  You’ve never really loved anybody, have you, Mother?

  Can’t think about that. Look around. Smell coriander, garlic, rosemary. Hear the piped-in zither, nasal but pleasing. Listen to Mel. Sunlight through the plate-glass window by their shoulders gilded Mel’s hair, which stuck out around her head in rain-wet spikes, like the Statue of Liberty. NAKED POTATO, said a sign behind her. No, of course not: BAKED POTATO. But the image stayed with Nan while Mel chattered on: potatoes smooth and clean as Walker’s feet.

  At the end of the meal, over cardamom tea with honey, fragrant and calming, Mel said, “So. What’s gonna happen in this trial?”

  “Pre-Trial Hearing—that comes first. I’m charged with Kidnapping. We’re pleading Not Guilty. Then either the judge will dismiss the case, or he won’t.”

  “And then what happens?”

  “We’ll probably go to trial. Then either the jury will convict me, or they won’t.”

  Mel’s large hands gripped her glass of tea. She was wearing a wrinkled black shirt with the sleeves rolled back. Nan could see the muscles in her forearms tighten above her bracelet tattoos. “I meant, with Janey. You’ll get her eventually. Right?”

  “Mel. I don’t know what’s going to happen. With Jane, or with me. Right now I just want to keep her away from her father. Keep her safe.”

  “But the judge’ll have to give her to you, right? Her father’s a scumbag, and her mother abandoned her.”

  Mel’s voice quavered on the word “abandoned.” Nan could see the equation in her too-bright eyes. But Jane’s situation wasn’t what Mel’s had been. Surely Mel realized that Jane would only be safe out of the country, no matter how the trial turned out.

  Mel didn’t realize anything of the kind. “You’ll stay here, in Providence. Where you’ve got, you know, allies. You two’ll be together for good.”

  For good?

  And there it was again: The Thought. Plead out! came its whisper in her head.

  Better, Nan saw—feeling miserably Machiavellian—not to make Mel face facts. She needed Mel and Val too much to risk the truth.

  “If I don’t get sent to jail. We’ll see.”

  “We’ll see. We’ll see. That’s what they used to say. The foster mothers. We’ll see.” Mel’s voice was so loud that, behind his counter, the blue-turbaned chef looked their way in alarm.

  Nan put a hand out, meaning to say (though how could she?), Everything will be all right. As her fingers closed around Mel’s wrist, there was a sudden wet explosion. Liquid and shards of glass leapt into the air. Nan jumped back. Her head hit the top of the wooden booth and warm wetness sprayed her face. Something bounced off the table and fell into her lap. Bright and round. The bottom of Mel’s tea glass: she’d gripped it so hard that it shattered. Across from her, Mel held up both hands, like someone stopping traffic. Blood, bright red, webbed her fingers. Looking at it, Nan felt the room wobble, then begin to spin.

  The proprietor appeared with a rag and a bucket. “So sorry! So sorry!” he exclaimed. Nan had to look away as he began mopping the mess—blood, tea, glass—into the bucket. The blue-turbaned chef appeared with a brass box, out of which he pulled a roll of bandages and a tube of antiseptic. He, too, began to apologize. Then Nan apologized, and so did Mel. Finally they left—Mel having been swabbed and bandaged—in a four-part chorus of diminishing regrets.

  They walked up the street in sunshine punctuated by little bursts of wetness from the trees overhead, no longer Girls Together, each thinking her own thoughts. Nan’s were of Mel; no doubt Mel’s were of Jane. Mel was so young. What could she know about irreconcilable desires? About the logic of betrayal?

  At the Hair and Now, a dark, Italian-looking young man retrofitted (as Mel put it) Nan. “Going to an Event?” he asked as he shook out a lavender smock and draped it over Nan. His warm fingers, tying it, brushed the nape of her neck.

  “You could say that.”

  He slathered Nan’s head with maroon paste, wrapped it in plastic, put her under the dryer. “Bake! Bake! Bake!” chanted Mel into her ear, holding up old issues of Cosmopolitan whose covers promised MOST MIND-BLOWING ORGASMS EVER! and PUSH HIS LOVE BUTTONS! Then the narrow young man shampooed, combed, snipped, dried, applying various fragrant potions along the way.

  “Work and turn!” he exclaimed finally, stepping back. And there in the mirror was a Bellevue matron, eyes a resigned but brilliant blue under a cap of sleek dark hair. Behind the matron stood Mel, waving her bandaged hands like some apparition out of a fifties horror movie. “Cosmic! That Anglo-Saxon helmet look is just genius.”

  They were driven home by Val, who dutifully admired what Mel called Retro-Nan. The rain-washed streets shone in the midafternoon sun.

  Climbing the last flight of stairs—Mel calling up from her own door, “See you for dinner, okay?”—Nan felt weariness like a mineral deposit in her calves, the small of her back. Her scalp stung from the unaccustomed attention. She was thinking of these things, and of the glass of wine that would banish them, when she saw the figure standing by her door. Black-coated back blending into the shadows of the hallway.

  Her heart kicked. Without stopping to think, she said, “Alex?”

  Fourteen

  There had always been something in Gabriel’s stance. Something held in check, behind a willed and therefore precarious gentleness. He’d often made Nan think of a child who isn’t sure he’s been invited to the party, who could join it or wreck it, depending.

  He made her think that now. For an instant, as he turned and began to walk toward her, Nan saw a young boy. Bruised, battered, eager, loving. Running to meet his mother’s pickup, down a dirt road through summer woods. She thought, incredulously, I’m glad to see him.

  “Nan!”

  He seemed about to embrace her. His arms in the black trench coat lifted. Without intending to, Nan took a step backward.

  “I, I can’t—” Breathe; breathe. “I can’t talk to you, Gabriel.” Her voice in her own ears was quavery, an old woman’s voice.

  “Nan—for God’s sake. It’s me. Me.”

  His voice was—oh, it was!—like home.

  He began walking toward her, but slowly. She made herself stand her ground. “We’re not supposed to see each other, or talk to each other. Until the, the trial.”

  “That’s bullshit! You know it is, Nan. We need to talk.”

  He was close enough now for her to see his silver eyes. One-way mirrors. In the dimness of the hallway they seemed the only source of light. She shivered.

  “You’re cold,” Gabriel said. “Let’s go inside. Can we? Can we sit down like two reasonable beings—two old friends, Nan, for God’s sake—and talk things out?”

  How tired he looks. Almost … old.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Nan. Please.
”

  The groove in his forehead deepened. She would have to be steel to get through this.

  “I can’t. I promised Jenny—I promised my lawyer. I shouldn’t be talking to you at all. Please, Gabe. Please go.”

  “All right, Nan. I’ll be brief.” His voice became tender. “I want my daughter. Just tell me where she is. That’s all you have to do.”

  The tenderness; the longing. Real, she knew. She did not need his earnest eyes, his stance (leaning now against the rough cinder-block wall) of violent humility, to tell her that. She felt it in her own body: missing Jane.

  Gabriel took another step toward her. There was a very large, very hairy-looking centipede on the wall between them. Nan kept her eyes on it.

  “How can you keep my daughter from me?” Softly, he echoed Nan’s very question to herself. “What right do you have to do that? To me or to her? To her, Nan!”

  My daughter, my wife, my house, my patients. But Jane loved her father. Nan knew that, though it was something she had (Be honest!) fought hard, for the last six months, to forget. She thought of Jane’s distant, unmoving face whenever (so seldom) she’d spoken of Gabriel during their months of exile. She remembered the fierce, yearning way in which Jane had attached herself first to Val, then to Walker.

  Gabriel said urgently, “Jane needs her father.”

  The hallway had begun to fill with the smell of someone’s cooking, vegetables boiling, like wet washrags. Gabriel took a step closer. On the wall between them the centipede made a quick figure eight, then froze.

  “Nan. Don’t you remember how it was? Remember the time you and I took her to the Olympic Peninsula, to the rain forest? Remember the little cabin we stayed in, at the edge of the ocean? And Jane said, she was three then, what was it she said? About the water? ‘This water is …’”

  “‘This water tastes like brown.’”

  Jane had stood at the westernmost edge of the country in a raspberry corduroy jumpsuit and white socks heavy with sand. They called to her and she came and hung on to Gabriel and searched his pockets for his keys, patting each one and laughing.

  She felt herself begin to waver. Jane was his daughter. Who was she, Nan, to separate father and daughter? Whom God hath joined together.

  No—that’s Gabriel and—

  “Alex,” she said. “What about Alex?”

  “My wife left me, Nan. She left Jane. What rights does a mother have, if we don’t even know where she is?” He looked at her closely. “Or do you know?”

  Her heart checked, then began to thud. “No. No, I don’t. But she asked me to take Jane, Gabriel. She begged me.”

  “Why?”

  “You know why.”

  He took another step toward Nan. “Why?”

  Here it was, the moment she’d dreaded, the thing that had to be said.

  “She said— She said you’d— Abused Jane. Sexually.”

  Gabriel straightened. “That’s ridiculous! It’s preposterous. It’s—” His hand came up and hit the wall between them. It made a loud, flat sound. The centipede skated upward.

  “Nan. You know that’s not true. Don’t you?”

  She swallowed. “I don’t know anything anymore.” That at least was true.

  Was Gabriel’s indignation—clearly genuine, clearly heartfelt—because the charge against him was unfounded? Or simply because it had been made at all? It wasn’t the first he’d heard it. That much was clear from the speed with which he regained his composure.

  “Alex is disturbed,” he said, in a calm, logical tone. “She’s sick, Nan, she’s been sick for a long time. You know that. You’re her mother—you must have seen it.”

  “No,” Nan said, faintly.

  Gabriel took another step toward her. “I didn’t want to have to tell you this. But Alex was having an affair. My wife was unfaithful. She betrayed me, and she betrayed Jane.” Another step. “What rights does a mother like that have?”

  Gabriel was standing very close now. He was pale with anger. The silver eyes, inches from her own, burned. Nan felt a scrabbling in her chest, like a tiny gerbil on a treadmill.

  “It’s too late for Alex. But not for Jane. Tell me where she is.”

  “I don’t know where she is.”

  “Give me back my daughter.”

  My daughter, my wife, my house, my patients. But his voice held real anguish. As if he saw her see this, Gabriel stood still, his fury suddenly replaced by the old imploring look. For an instant Nan hesitated. And there it was again: The Thought. Beautiful, this time, compassionate, a hand extended to a fellow sufferer. Plead out. Then another thought flashed: What about my daughter? Alex trusted me with Jane. Wherever she is now, she’s still trusting me.

  “I can’t, Gabe. I’m sorry.”

  The refusal—or was it the apology?—infuriated him. She saw rage take him, pouring through his body. His hands flew up, one of them bloody from the blow to the wall. She jumped back. He grabbed her shoulders. She smelled cigars, Calvados, the rusty odor of blood on his knuckles. The animal in her chest was pedaling furiously. Gabriel’s face, so close. Gabriel’s blood. She closed her eyes. His thumb dug into her clavicle and his breathing filled her ears.

  Then there was another sound—a pounding—the noise of feet in the stairwell. Gabriel’s grip loosened. His breath was moist in her ear.

  “You know what’s right,” he said, low-voiced. “Do it.”

  “Nan? You there?”

  Mel’s voice. Mel’s blessed voice.

  When Nan opened her eyes, Gabriel was a shadow melting into other shadows at the end of the hall, under the baleful red glow of the EXIT sign. She heard the heavy metal door close. She started to shake.

  And then Mel was beside her, Mel’s strong, muscular arm under her own.

  “You okay?”

  |

  “Christ!” Jenny Root boomed. “Sweet fuckin’ Christ!”

  “I’m sorry,” Nan said meekly into the phone.

  “How do you expect me to defend you if you do stuff like that? Stuff I explicitly warned you not to do?”

  Defend.

  “Or maybe you’d rather just be your own attorney? There’s an old saying, ever hear it? The lawyer who defends himself has a fool for a client.” The peremptory sound of a beeper came to Nan clearly through the receiver. “Okay. We’ll just hafta wait and see what he does. Gotta go, due in superior court in ten, don’t forget your deposition this afternoon, got the address? Call me after. Don’t say anything except what we agreed.”

  Agreed?

  “Got it? Are we on the same page?”

  “Okay,” Nan said. Before the second syllable had died away there was a click, and Jenny Root was archives.

  |

  An affair? Alex?

  But even as she questioned it Nan saw that it could be true. The last time she’d seen her, that night in the hospital, Alex had been hiding something, holding something back—Nan had known it, even in the dark, even drugged. Farther back than that, even. On that December morning when Alex had asked her to take Jane away, she’d felt something. A sense of something not said, something concealed.

  So that was why Gabe had finally brought charges against Nan. Whatever hold Alex had had on him—whatever dirt—was canceled out by her affair. Or Gabe thought it was. Affair plus Abandonment equals Unfit Mother—that was how he’d see it. And Alex, in her own way, must have agreed. She blamed herself for what had happened—what she believed had happened—to Jane. She’d failed to watch over her daughter because she’d been distracted (how well Nan remembered that state of distraction!) by her lover.

  At first Nan, too, thought, This changes everything. Then she saw that nothing had changed. She’d never been sure—not sure—that her daughter had drawn the right conclusions from what she’d seen. Alex was no less reliable because she had a lover. Because she was (Nan realized, with bitter honesty) her mother’s daughter.

  |

  GRANDMOTHER CHARGED IN ABDUCTION CASE

 
NUDE MODEL STEALS CHILD: INTERSTATE KIDNAPPING RING?

  RHODE ISLAND NO REFUGE FOR CRIMINALS, MAYOR VOWS

  “We tee off on Friday,” Jenny Root told Nan. “The shit has hit the cyclotron.”

  She was furious. She rolled up the newspapers she’d brought with her and flung them onto Nibbrig’s sofa along with her motorcycle helmet. It was late on Wednesday afternoon. She’d had to make a house call to coach Nan, because of the camera crews that converged whenever Nan tried to leave the building. Val had gone after one journalist with Mel’s piercing gun, and nearly caught him. Nan, fearing that next time he’d succeed and be charged with assault and they’d both end up felons, had stopped going out at all.

  The pretrial hearing had been moved up, Jenny Root announced. It would take place in two days. Apparently the mayor had brought pressure to bear.

  “Five more days, five fucking days, and they would’ve rotated, Not-Too-Bright Wright would’ve been replaced as pretrial judge. But no, your son-in-law has to spill to the press. I’ll get the fucker if it kills me. He’s luggage!” She plopped down on the sofa beside Nan, batting away an overhanging ficus branch as if it were some part of Gabriel’s anatomy.

  Nan’s first reaction was relief. She hadn’t been out of the apartment in days. Mel brought in groceries and anything else she needed. It felt like house arrest.

  But Jenny Root’s other news was devastating. She hadn’t wanted to tell Nan, but now, with the pretrial two days away, she had to. The prosecution’s chief witness was Gabriel.

  And there it was again. The Thought, seductive in its new (since Gabriel’s visit) guise: compassion trimmed with fear.

  Jenny Root looked closely at Nan, who had sunk back on the sofa. “You gonna barf? Put your head down.” When she didn’t comply, Jenny Root put her hands on the back of Nan’s neck and pushed. Nose in her lap, Nan thought, I can’t do this.

  Nan should know, Jenny Root said, as if she’d read Nan’s mind, that the prosecution would offer to drop the charges—in exchange, of course, for Jane. “We can still plead out, during the pretrial.”

  Trade Jane for freedom? Trade her?