The Year She Disappeared

by Ann Harleman

  This time the two lawyers reappeared within minutes, both smiling the smiles of people who’d gotten what they wanted. Leer’s expression as he looked toward Gabriel justified his name. Gabriel straightened.

  Jenny Root sat down next to Nan and put an arm around her shoulders. “Everything’s cool. They’ll drop the charges right now. You just tell me how to get hold of Jane.”

  Nan’s heart began thumping out a crazy waltz. “Now?”

  She was still holding on to Miami Getaway Barbie; she pulled it out of her bag and sat clutching it in both hands. Somehow she’d imagined there’d be more time, a breathing space between the decision and the act.

  If I do this, it’s forever.

  “Yeah, now. Leer and I go back, I tell Wright how to hook up with Jane, he tables the case with a note to dismiss. Pending Jane’s delivery to DCYF”

  “DCYF?”

  “Department of Children, Youth, and Families. Officially she’ll be in the custody of the State. Till determination is made.”

  “Why won’t she just go home with Gabriel? To Seattle.”

  “Nan.” Jenny Root’s deep-voiced whisper held a note of frayed patience. “Allegations have been made that raise the question of Jane’s welfare. You made them. The State has to assure itself of what’s best for the child.”

  “How long will that take? Where will Jane be while it’s going on?” Hope filled Nan’s throat so that she could barely speak. “Will she, will they leave her with me?”

  “She’ll go into foster care.” Jenny Root paused, then said reluctantly, “Maybe for several months. DCYF has a huge backlog. Once Jane’s safely in custody, she’ll have to wait her turn. There’re kids ahead of her in way worse situations.”

  Nan didn’t care about the problems of children unknown to her, she cared about Jane. Jane in a series of foster homes, living with strangers. Jane, who’d already spent the last six months being shunted from one place to another. She remembered her face as they’d pulled away from the curb the day of their last picnic, with Val and Mel standing on the sidewalk in the morning light. Remembered Mel’s story of foster home after foster home.

  “Nan!” Jenny Root whispered urgently. “Wright’ll be ripshit. He hates to be kept waiting.”

  Looking up, Nan saw Gabriel, now straight-backed, nodding and smiling at Leer, who presumably was saying the same things Jenny Root was saying. Yet the tilt of Gabriel’s head was … happy.

  He doesn’t care how long Jane has to wait. Or where. So long as it’s him she ends up with. So long as he has his revenge, on his unfaithful wife, on me.

  Suddenly Nan could see what she hadn’t been able to see before, sitting on the ladies’ room floor with Jenny Root; she could see another life for Jane. Jane hip-deep in marigolds beside a wooden fence that steamed in the sun, giving up the dampness of the night before. Jane smiling into the early-morning light, through the silver-leaved olive trees. Jane by the edge of the ocean, sniffing the salt air. The vision was so clear! It did not seem like something imagined—more like something transmitted.

  “I can’t,” she said to Jenny Root. “I can’t do it.”

  “Nan! For Christ’s sake!”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

  Jenny Root looked at Nan for a long moment. At last she said, “Okay. Yeah. I guess I knew that.”

  She gave Nan’s shoulder a hard, painful squeeze. Then she rose and walked—slowly at first, then more purposefully—up to the front of the room. She tapped Jamison Leer on the shoulder; there was a brief whispered exchange; Leer turned to stare at Nan. Then both lawyers went up to the judge, and all three disappeared into the room behind the dais. Gabriel didn’t turn around. After several hour-long minutes the judge emerged, followed by the two lawyers.

  “All rise!”

  When the shuffle of rising and reseating had subsided, Wright beckoned to Nan. Heart pounding, she got up, still holding Miami Getaway Barbie, and walked down the aisle to stand with the two lawyers below the dais. Jenny Root came and stood beside her, their arms just grazing each other. Wright gazed down at them. His face wore a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger look.

  “Mrs. Mulholland. You understand the offer that has been made to you?” His deep voice had an orator’s ponderous tempo.

  Nan nodded. At the other end of the dais, the stenographer’s fingers flew, her machine paying out white paper tape like an adding machine.

  “Speak up!”

  “Yes.”

  Jenny Root elbowed her. “Your Honor,” she whispered.

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  “The prosecution has offered to drop the charge of kidnapping if you will tell us the whereabouts of your granddaughter. It’s your decision, and you have the right to a trial. Let me remind you, however, of the words of Anatole France. ‘To die for an idea is to set a rather high price on conjecture.’”

  “I understand—”

  “Let me finish! Idealism is noble, but it is expensive. You should know that, if you are found guilty, this is a serious crime with serious consequences. You may well find yourself serving a prison—”

  Sanctimonious dipshit, Mel would have said. “Your Honor, I can’t let Jane—”

  “I’m speaking to you! Let me finish!” He leaned forward, unhooked his gold-rimmed spectacles and folded them in one hand. His eyes were small and hard, like peanuts. “It is a generous and compassionate offer that this Court has made to you, Mrs. Mul—”

  “No!” Despair made Nan’s voice louder than she’d intended. “Don’t you see? She’s been abused enough already, she—”

  “Nan!” Jenny Root seized her arm. “Be quiet!”

  Jamison Leer said, “Your Honor, if—I repeat, if—there’s been any abuse, it has been by the child’s mother. Doctor Verdi alleges—”

  “Shut up!” Nan told him. “You don’t know a thing about it.”

  “Nan,” Jenny Root moaned.

  Wright’s round, bald head glittered with sweat. He shouted, “I will not tolerate this behavior in my courtroom!”

  Gabriel was suddenly standing on the other side of Jamison Leer. Fear stilled Nan’s breath; she fought the urge to turn and run. Gabriel in the hallway outside her apartment; Gabriel’s hands on her shoulders. A glance seemed to pass between him and the judge. A glance of mutual understanding. Nan felt a sweeping, plummeting sensation, like going down too fast in an elevator. Her fingers tightened around the doll in her hand. Fear turned into fury.

  Who are these men? What right do they have to decide?

  She said—she was shouting, too, now— “Jane’s been through enough! Can’t any of you see that? Don’t any of you care about Jane?”

  By now the entire courtroom was stirring and buzzing. The policeman beside the dais shouted, “Quiet! Quiet down!” Wright’s gavel beat on the rostrum. The stenographer typed furiously.

  Wright looked directly, malevolently, into Nan’s eyes. She saw on his face the male’s fury at losing control, not only of her, but of himself.

  “Take her out of here!” he roared. His gavel hit the rostrum. “Criminal contempt! Six months!”

  Jenny Root said, “Your Honor! My client apologizes for the disturbance.”

  “I do not!”

  “Get this woman out of my courtroom!”

  Two policemen appeared from nowhere, shoved Jenny Root aside, gripped Nan’s arms. She stiffened, resisting. Jenny Root said, “Your Honor!”

  “Silence! Or you’ll go with her!”

  The courtroom stilled. Nan found herself being half pushed, half pulled toward a door at the side of the room. She saw Gabriel, white with fury, lunge after her; saw Leer grab his arms and hold him back. She saw Jenny Root’s horrified face. Then Wright shouted, “Next!” and the stenographer tore off a length of white paper tape with a crisp, confirming sound.

  Fifteen

  Nan woke to the sound of women’s voices. Strangers’ voices. Then she remembered: I’m in jail. She lay still and kept her eyes closed.

 
“Well, it creeps me out. Hearing somebody up there over my head in the middle of the night. In a empty bunk! I didn’t know for sure the Lord is watching over me, I’d’a thought it was a ghost.”

  “You were really off the hook. Wasn’t she, Ellen? They brought her in around eleven. Ellen and I, we just played possum. Didn’t we, Ellen?”

  “Looks like it ain’t one of Ellen’s talking days. Anyway, the new one sure can snore.”

  “She old, that’s why. Lemme explain to you, Donna Jean. The nasal passages, see, the septum—”

  “Forget it. There’s the buzzer. I don’t want Scantling ripped at me again today.”

  “We gonna wake up the Scarsdale Matron, or let her sleep? God! I hate breakfast the most.”

  “How many times I gotta tell you? Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain. God ain’t up there going, Marjorie! every time He gets pissed at something.”

  “Shoulda combed your hair, Donna Jean. God don’t like ugly.”

  The clatter of departure. A door slammed. Nan opened her eyes to an empty room. A narrow bed, hard, close to the ceiling, where early-morning gloom had collected in the corners. The upper bunk. Another bunk bed opposite hers. Three other women in this room, then? Two dark scarred wooden wardrobes with mildewed mirrors. Four footlockers. Two night tables. One bulletin board. A breeze through the open window stirred curtains of thin flowered cotton. Nan lay and listened to the morning sounds of birds: the bicycle-bell call of blue jays; the cardinals’ “Weirdo! Weirdo!”; the dim sound of mourning doves. (Quick flash of Walker—but far away, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope.) There were no bars on the window, she noticed.

  “No cells here,” she remembered the warden—Warden Gordon, could that really be his name?—saying proudly the night before. Shaved head, puffy lips, cheeks inflating and deflating: he looked like a large, pale fish. Walkie-talkies chattering; incomprehensible jokes; clipped laughter. Fingerprinting: ink that smelled like chloroform and clung to her fingers. Photographs. Undressing in a long cement-walled room with a shower and benches; a female body searcher with a face like a safety pin. Nan’s tattoo and her breastbone scar were carefully drawn in red on a form that held the outline of a female figure, front and back. Just another modeling session, Nan told herself. Naked and trembling, her nipples pricking with cold, she read the rest of the form upside down:

  INMATE NAME________________________

  D.O.B._______________________________

  GANG AFFILIATION?____________________

  IF YES, NAME OF GANG___________________

  ANY ENEMY ISSUES______________________

  Nan’s clothes, shoes, watch were noted on another form, then put into a paper bag along with Miami Getaway Barbie. Her arms were piled with beige garments folded into anonymity and smelling of starch. A shower, while the bored body searcher looked on. Beige pajamas, too big, scratchy. Back out to the counter, where a poster on the wall said, IN FOR LIFE? THERE’S NO FUTURE IN SUICIDE. Someone had crossed out the last two words in heavy dark pencil. Nan signed the inmate property record where they showed her, juggling the clothing in her arms while she held on to the pen. Then a kind-looking woman in civilian clothes led her down a dim, deserted hallway. Shuffling along in papery prison slippers, wearing her glasses (“If you need ’em, wear ’em; otherwise, we take ’em”), Nan was already beginning not to be Nan.

  Now she thought, If the others have to be at breakfast, I must, too. She threw back the thin cotton blanket with its harsh smell of bleach and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. She was looking down and contemplating the drop (No ladder—how on earth did I get up here last night?) when the door burst open.

  “Mulholland! Get your ass down to the dining room. One demerit!”

  |

  The first day, Saturday, passed in a blur of disorientation, boredom, and fear. Nan didn’t know the rules or the routine, and no one bothered to explain them to her. (What did you expect, she chided herself, a Prisoner’s Handbook? A formal briefing? This is not the Foreign Service.) By the end of the day she’d accumulated three demerits and the information that two more would earn her time in something called Seg.

  Except for watching the never-silent TV in the little sitting area along the corridor, there was nothing, absolutely nothing, to do. Her roommates didn’t return to the room. They must have been among the many women who stared at her at lunch (she missed breakfast altogether); but because she’d kept her eyes closed while they spoke that morning, Nan didn’t know what they looked like. The room caught the afternoon sun and was hot but cheerful. Each neatly made bunk, except for Nan’s, was covered by a bright-colored afghan, obviously homemade. Two or three stuffed animals reposed on each pillow. There were some books on the bottom shelf of one of the night tables: A Pictorial Atlas of Skin Infections; the Bible; Reptiles of the Pacific World. It seemed unwise to be caught leafing through another prisoner’s books, even if they’d been more appealing. Nan left the room and wandered down the sunny corridor. Here and there electric fans pushed the warm afternoon air back and forth. At both ends there was the upright figure of a blue-uniformed guard, recalling in a strange, skewed way the hovering presence of The Nannies. A man in a dark suit and a Roman collar passed by, arms full of books, tightly buttoned face. He did not greet Nan. She went through an open wire door—a small, dark woman mopping the floor had propped it open with her bucket—and into another wing identical to her own. One demerit, happily administered by Safety Pin. Delivered back to her own wing, Nan sat down before the television to watch Oprah. A woman with very long, very black hair came and sat down next to her. Nan asked her why she, like all the other women Nan had seen in her wanderings so far, wore blue garments rather than Nan’s beige. The woman shrugged apologetically. “No hablo inglés, señora.” Nan’s elementary Spanish, begun a lifetime ago in Seattle, seemed to have deserted her. So that (another pretty shrug from the woman) was that.

  Again at dinner—macaroni and cheese that tasted like it smelled, of library paste—no one spoke to Nan. The Scarsdale Matron, she remembered one of her unseen roommates saying. Perhaps everyone saw her that way, thanks to Jenny Root’s make-under. She touched her hair, still stiff with spray from its day in court. The heads around her, like the women themselves, could not have been more different: Afros, dreadlocks, crew cuts, shags, and the hair of the Hispanic women, either long, wild curls or neat buns. They were all young, these women—younger by far than Nan. The ones at Nan’s table talked among themselves, complaining about the food, gossiping. She felt the way she had the first day of high school, before she’d found Deenie. Then she’d been odd because she was poor and from the inner city; now the reason was the opposite.

  But that night, in her room, everything changed. Marjorie changed it.

  |

  Nan couldn’t, that second night, climb up into her bed. There really was no ladder. The night before, she remembered now, the young assistant warden had called a guard and together they’d heaved Nan up onto her mattress. She tried to hoist herself up, her feet on the mattress below, her hands clutching at the edges of her own.

  “You oughta have a medical bottom.”

  The voice behind her, rich as a preacher’s, surprised Nan so that she let go. She dropped to the floor, stumbled, fell onto one knee.

  “Hey!” The woman pulled her up and folded her into the lower bunk. Then she sat down beside her, wide-bosomed, black, motherly. She held a stuffed panda under one arm.

  “A medical bottom?” Confused, Nan pictured her own bare behind with a thermometer sticking out it.

  “Yeah. You’re too old for a top.” The woman looked closely at Nan. A wad of chewing gum switched from cheek to cheek. “Too old to be in here at all. What’d you do, girl?”

  “My granddaughter, Jane, she’s four—almost five, now. I kidnapped her.”

  “Now why’d you wanna go and do a thing like that for?”

  “She, her father was—molesting her.” No point going into the questi
ons, the uncertainties, the doubts Nan herself still had.

  “So you saved her. You two hear that?” She turned to the two women who had just entered the room. The tiny redhead said, “Praise God!” and grasped Nan’s hand, while the other one just smiled from beneath the long, tangled hair that nearly covered her face. A bewildered Nan found herself accepted, suddenly and completely.

  Later she would understand that Jane had been her passport, the key to belonging; that to the women in this place the one thing that still mattered—the sole source of strength and resilience and hope—was their children. Now she just leaned into the shadow of the upper bunk, breathless and a little taken aback, as if a door she’d been pushing on had suddenly yielded, catapulting her inside.

  Here they were, then: Nan’s new family. Yet another pickup family.

  Marjorie. Like so many black women, older than she looked. (Early forties, Nan judged: she mentioned leaving school at fourteen, in the late sixties, pregnant.) Skin the color of Italian plums, fitted close over broad, strong bones. Hair like coarse cotton thread, every strand alive. Curious about everything: the books on the night table were hers, except for the Bible. In for abandoning her father, who had Alzheimer’s, at the greyhound racetrack in Lincoln, with a note pinned to his sweatshirt detailing his condition and his care. (“It was him or her grandkids,” Donna Jean said. “Now she don’t have neither.”)

  Donna Jean. The tiniest woman Nan had ever seen—not just short (though she was certainly that: about four foot ten), but scaled down all over. Red hair, short and shaggy; freckles; a peculiarly intent gaze. “My Lord has shown me how to overcome my downfalls,” she told Nan, who immediately understood that she herself was a target for salvation. In for bombing an abortion clinic, leaving one of the doctors in a wheelchair for life. Transferred here to Minimum Security just last month, thanks to three years of exemplary behavior and the merciful intervention of her Lord.