The Year She Disappeared

by Ann Harleman

  Us?

  “It’s like a fucking police state! Lock ‘em in a room, keep up the pressure, everybody caves sooner or later. You’ve been imprisoned without trial. That’s fucking unconstitutional. First Rhode Island takes over another state’s felony charge, without even questioning it. And now this? Wright’s making a mockery out of the law.”

  Visibly controlling herself, Jenny Root looked around at the ex-addicts’ paintings, which covered the walls with sunrises and ocean waves and cheerful-looking animals. PATIENCE + PERSISTENCE = PROGRESS, the wall opposite them advised. She got up and peered around the corner of the partition, then came over to Nan’s side of the table and leaned in close. She said softly, under the sound of the lawn mower, “Don’t let the scumbags get away with it.”

  The freckled guard appeared, smelling strongly of cigarettes. Jenny Root retreated to her side of the table and sat down.

  “Two minutes!” the guard said. She stood at the edge of the partition behind Jenny Root, arms folded, eyes on her prisoner.

  Jenny Root crossed her eyes at Nan. “Okay,” she said in her usual lawyerly tone, at her usual speed, “I’m here for two things, one, tell me what you need, two, tell me what you want me to do.” Without a pause for Nan to do either of these: “Val will be here tomorrow, I got permission for him to visit you.”

  “Val?” Nan said, distracted by the guard’s unblinking stare.

  “Val.” Jenny Root’s voice held a peculiar urgency.

  “One minute!”

  Jenny Root rose. She would file an appeal. She would keep trying to get Nan put on house arrest with an electronic anklet. For now, at least she’d managed to keep her from being transferred to Maximum. “But be careful. Minimum doesn’t take violent crimes, but there’re a lotta crazies in the jails now, with the mental hospitals closing.” Then came a volley of fast-forward questions—Nan’s health, did she need anything, medication? books? money?—followed by a quick, hard, unexpected embrace.

  Val would come to visit, Jenny Root said, hands still on Nan’s shoulders and digging in hard. Again her voice was oddly emphatic. Nan should listen to Val.

  |

  Tampon Stew for dinner. Little deaf woman has adopted me. Relentlessly playful. They call me the woman who won’t talk—about Jane, they mean, but she thinks it means I understand Sign. One of the cos—the guards here are called Correctional Officers, not jailers—went out on lunch break & never came back.

  What does any of this matter?

  |

  Two things Nan didn’t write down for Alex. That she’d felt relieved to see Jenny Root go. That this evening she’d refused a visit from Gabriel, as it was her right to do. The first right she’d found herself to have, in this place—but one she would not have traded for any other. One that made her feel, for the first time in more than six months, safe.

  |

  Wednesday night, late, long after lights-out, long after the CO had slammed the door and called good night. The curtains were tied back, and rain-washed night air coursed through the room. The moon, pared to a silver sliver, hung in the unbarred window. The women’s faces were visible in the dim light from outside—not moonlight but the lights that burned all night on the guard towers. Marjorie and Donna Jean sat on either end of the lower bunk across from Nan, their feet meeting companionably in the middle. Ellen and Maria, Ellen’s lover, occupied the bunk above them. Maria, who was Puerto Rican, had long black hair that rambled across her shoulders and down her plump brown arms. She did not look a like a lesbian, but then, what did Nan know about lesbians?

  “When I get out, I’m gonna get some fancy heels and a fancy dress and go out dancing with my husband.” (Donna Jean)

  “I would even enjoy breaking a glass on my kitchen floor. Just normal things.” (Maria)

  “I miss belly buttons. Blowing on their belly buttons” (Marjorie) “Guys? You blow on guys’ belly buttons?”

  “No, doofus. My grandkids’.”

  “As much time as I spend sleeping in here, when I am free, nunca mas. I will never want to sleep no more.”

  They’re young, Nan thought. So young they can still think, someday. Someday I’ll get out of here. Someday I’ll live in a pretty white house with my children. Someday I’ll understand … everything.

  And that was when she realized, eyes on the hard bright fingernail of moon, that she herself did not really expect to leave this place. If the Sun & Moon should doubt. The open window made her uneasy, as if bars would have kept danger out, rather than prisoners in. Jenny Root had seemed to be saying, this afternoon, that there was some way out of here. Don’t let the fucker get away with it, she’d said—as if there were some way Nan could fight him.

  But I can’t, I can’t fight. Not anymore.

  The weariness she’d felt earlier crawled over her, claiming her inch by inch, an undertow beneath the whispering women’s voices.

  “I get out of here, I’m just gonna get laid and laid,” Marjorie said.

  Donna Jean hooted. “By who?”

  “Gonna advertise in the Personals, month before I go. ‘Muscled Man of Color’—that’s how it’s gonna start.”

  “Those guys? If you saw one sitting here, he would scare you.”

  “They scare themselves.”

  Laughter pricked the darkness.

  Maria said, “I was married once. He would beat me, kick me and stomp me. He bruise my ribs.”

  Ellen sat up, a quick motion of protest, or distress. Her Raggedy Ann doll fell to the floor with a soft thud. She rubbed her palms over her face. The gesture pushed her hair back from her forehead, and in the not-quite-moonlight Nan saw a band of red scars crosshatched on it.

  Maria said, “He slice my hand to the point where I need stitches. That is when I make up my mind. Nunca mas.”

  “Yeah—you can make up your mind,” Marjorie said. “But how you gonna make up your heart?”

  “He was a deeply troubled person,” Donna Jean offered.

  “He was …” a whispered word, in Spanish.

  “A douche-bag!”

  “Dick puke!”

  Laughter like dry leaves.

  Donna Jean said that before she found Jesus she used to want to have sex with Morrissey’s voice. Marjorie said that she had a crush on Gorbachev, whom she referred to as “that bald Russian dude with the map of Alaska on his head.” Nan’s stock went up briefly when she said she’d met him once; then it was decided that she must be lying.

  Donna Jean said, in a sleepy voice, “‘Now we see through a glass, darkly; but then, face to face.’ Lookin’ at that moon, don’t it make you know there is a Higher Power?”

  |

  Three a.m. For the first time since she’d been incarcerated, Nan woke with a clenching pain in her belly, the way she used to after Tod died: a sort of twisting inward, which she’d eventually come to recognize as loss. She lay awake in the nickel-colored light, listening to Marjorie’s gusty snores, listing her losses. First Tod; then Deenie. Now Alex, Val and Mel, Walker.

  Jane.

  Nan rolled over, in tiny motions so as not to wake her roommates, and pulled the notebook out from under her pillow. Her fingers found the little pencil and she began to write, forming the letters slowly, by feel.

  Do you remember, Alex? The moon bleeding into thin clouds over the Mediterranean; the sound of moths against the window screen?

  Look, Mama! you said. The moon’s a big big clam shell.

  The clouds thickened & the moon disappeared. There was only dark ocean melting into darker sky.

  Does it always come back? you asked.

  Always, I lied.

  Nan shut the notebook and tucked the little pencil into its spine. When it was safely back under her pillow—turned over now to the cool side—she closed her eyes. After a while there was rustling from the top bunk across the room, then a freighted silence. Then Ellen’s small soft cries—the only sound Nan had ever heard her make—and the quickening twang of bedsprings. The smell that travel
ed on the damp air made Nan remember, though it was different, the smell that she and Walker made. Uniquely theirs—perhaps every couple’s was different?—compounded from the tangible fluids of their separate desires.

  Comforted, she fell asleep.

  Sixteen

  Jail dreams:

  Alex walking toward her, carrying something, darkness in her eyes. What have they done to you? The path they stand on is paved with human bones. Drawing closer, the figure is suddenly not Alex but Nan’s mother. In her arms a struggling fox cub twists around to gnaw her belly.

  Deenie, fourteen again, in a dress made of rain.

  Pop drowning squirrels in a garbage can filled with water. Like cooking lobsters. Their heads up till the last possible second, bright eyes begging.

  Walker’s legs alongside Nan’s, their joined skin giving off light.

  The garden in Genoa, the scent of late roses, a snake streaming toward her across sun-struck stones.

  At the end of each sleep-glazed afternoon, the hollow sound of a train passing in the distance woke her. Waking was the worst time, as in the weeks after Tod’s death: knowing something is wrong before you know what it is. Mourning doves crying Cool! Cool! filled the room with sound. Were they everywhere, these birds, even in the grimmest places? Walker would have known.

  Dreams—even sad dreams, even terrifying dreams—were her one reliable refuge. Nan napped and napped. She did not dream of Jane.

  |

  Jenny Root came again, two days after her first visit, on Nan’s sixth day in the ACI. Wright was resisting all her efforts. Had Val come to see her yet? As on her first visit, Jenny Root’s tone was oddly emphatic, her gaze oddly intent. When Nan said, No, he hadn’t, she looked grave. There was a pause. The guard, a new one Nan hadn’t seen before, stood in one corner of the visitors’ area, not taking her eyes off the two women. Frowning, Jenny Root said at last, with that same odd emphasis, that she was concerned about Nan’s health.

  Surprised, Nan said, “I’m fine.”

  “One minute!” the guard said.

  “It’s the Fourth of July weekend coming up.” Jenny Root’s eyes locked with Nan’s. A lot of people were on vacation, she continued. If Nan was feeling at all ill, she should ask for the doctor.

  “Time’s up!”

  Getting to her feet, Jenny Root said, “It’s tough to be on the Wing twenty-four/seven. People get wiggy. Don’t fade on us, Nan.”

  Like most warnings, this one came too late. Shuffling back down the corridor beside the silent guard, Nan knew that whatever Jenny Root and Val had cooked up, whatever they wanted her to do, she no longer had the energy or the will to do it. She was safe now, and so was Jane, and that was enough. That was everything.

  Late-afternoon sun streamed into her room, igniting the brilliant green and purple of the afghan Donna Jean had laid across Nan’s bed. Nan sat down on it to wait for the dinner gong.

  Jail, like the State Department, decided everything for you. The result was a giving over first of effort, then of worry, then of will. What use was it to decide or even to desire anything? You went where you were sent, did (even the wives) what you were told. You accustomed yourself to the smell of open latrines, or olive blossoms; to the sound of church bells, or the muezzin, or horse-drawn carts at dawn laden with the bodies of the dead. It was possible, you eventually discovered, to accustom yourself to anything.

  |

  Donna Jean told me the scars across Ellen’s forehead are the stigmata. Marjorie snorted. (Hers are the only real snorts I’ve ever heard.) They’re from leaning against the barbed wire out in the yard on Kids’ Day, she said. Looking for her little boy, who never comes, because he’s dead.

  Six days now, Alex. It could be six months. Or six years. I am so tired.

  We’re both in exile, you & I.

  |

  Nan Mulholland had been in the ACI exactly a week when she received her first letter. Walker! she thought, when her name was called; and her heart lifted. But the return address was Gabriel’s.

  She stood with the smooth, buff-colored envelope trembling between her fingers, looking out the window in the little sitting area. In the yard a pair of iridescent dragonflies zigzagged through the bright July morning. The sound of the television, eternal as wallpaper, went on behind her; the mournful smell of poached eggs reached upward from the kitchen stairwell. Without looking down, Nan tore the sealed envelope across and across.

  After lunch, sitting on her bunk in the empty room, she laid the pieces out on her bright green and purple afghan (a gift from Donna Jean) and sat looking at them a long time before she leaned close enough to make out Gabriel’s physician’s scrawl. There was no salutation, no signature.

  Remember the night on my terrace when I told you that my mother had died? You are the only person I ever told about her.

  Jane has been my redemption. I love my daughter more than anything in the world. I would never hurt her. In your heart you know this.

  She knows this. And she needs me. If you separate us, you will regret it.

  Queasiness radiated through Nan. She grabbed the wastebasket and leaned over it, away from Donna Jean’s afghan.

  My terrace. My daughter. Two cherished possessions—cherished because they were possessions. No mention of my wife. The charmed circle now held only Gabe and Jane. No place there for Nan. No You can see Jane whenever you like. No Bygones will be bygones.

  The sound of feet scuffling made her look up. The little deaf woman, whose name Nan kept forgetting, stood in the doorway. When she caught Nan’s eye, she beckoned urgently, then began moving her hands in signs. Nan shook her head to show she didn’t understand. Dancing with impatience, the woman pointed to Nan, then down the hall, then to her own eyes. Nan shook her head again. The woman frowned, shrugged violently, and left.

  Nan looked down again at the letter, half expecting it to have disappeared. The sun slanted in through the thin curtains, picking out the gold edging on Donna Jean’s afghan. It was the mention of Gabe’s mother —of repair—that moved Nan most, as he undoubtedly had known it would. But she knew that past injuries could work the other way. She remembered something Simone Weil had written, something she’d clung to years ago, when she was desperately trying to understand the sarcasm and meanness Tod had sometimes shown her, dying. “A harmful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves. We commit such acts as a way of deliverance.”

  The prisoner holds the keys to her cell. Though she could reverse her decision at any moment—could decide to hand Jane over—it did not feel that way. It felt irrevocable. Part of a life that had ended, a story being told, in retrospect, about someone called “Nan Mulholland.” Someone she once knew. Someone whose last burst of decisiveness had used her up.

  Wearily, Nan got to her feet. Her knees creaked, and she thought: Old bones; and then: Bone tired. She shuffled the pieces of the letter together into a neat pile and tore them, stacked them, tore them again. Then she walked down the hall to the communal bathroom and flushed them down the toilet. Watching the sodden bits swirl and vanish in the rush of water, she felt free at last, and light.

  A tug on her sleeve made her turn around. The little deaf woman pointed at the doorway and made furious beckoning motions. When Nan stood still, she punched her shoulder.

  “Okay,” Nan said, “I’m coming,” forming the words carefully for the bright brown eyes trained on her lips. Why not? she thought. I’m done here. The woman grabbed her wrist, and Nan allowed herself to be towed out the door.

  At the end of the corridor everyone crowded around the front windows. Nan’s companion, still gripping her wrist, thrust her way forward through protesting prisoners—“Don’t push me, bitch!” “Who you lookin’ at?”—until Nan found herself at the very front, next to Donna Jean. On her other side, the little deaf woman’s shoulder dug into her arm. Behind them, bodies kept pressing forward. They had to put their palms on the glass and push, to keep from being crushed agains
t it.

  A camera crew from the ubiquitous Channel 10 News waited in a white van at the curb. A prisoner tottered down the walk to a waiting police car, supported by the little freckled CO and a man Nan didn’t know. “It’s Nancy,” Donna Jean said. “The hunger strike woman, the one from D Wing. They’re taking her to the hospital. That’s Doc Shovelton.” The woman’s blue prison sweater hung from her hunched shoulders; her profile, lit by the slanting afternoon sun, was all nose. She had to be helped into the police car. The doctor leaned in after her for a moment, then turned and started back up the walk. The camera swiveled to follow him. His face, above a silvery biblical beard, looked tired, angry, kind.

  Women behind Nan mugged for the camera and shouted rewards and invitations, some of them obscene, until two COs came to disperse them. Safety Pin, the one who’d presided over Nan’s strip search that first night, shoved her roughly. “If it ain’t the Media Queen,” she said, and grinned. “Tryin’ for another photo op?”

  |

  “Nanechka!”

  Val greeted Nan like the beloved aunt he’d told the authorities she was. (Hadn’t they noticed his accent? she wondered.) His face with its surround of black curls, its snapping black eyes, took her so much by surprise that she realized she hadn’t expected to see him here, ever. She’d given him up, along with the rest of her previous life.

  Nan sat down across from him. The smell of tobacco and Juicy Fruit and male sweat sent a swift current of homesickness through her. Folding her hands on the edge of the skittish card table, she found that all she could manage, all the lump in her throat allowed, was, “Val.”

  “How you are, Nan? You are fine?”

  “I’m okay. How are you? How’s Mel?”

  Safety Pin, having clearly decided Nan was no risk, went to lean out the window of the visitors’ cubicle, sucking on a forbidden cigarette. Early-morning air pushed in past her large bulk, cool and fresh and carrying the sound of birdsong.

  “Your cousin Mel is fine like ever. They are saying, one visitor at time, therefore she stays home. She says, Forgive!”

  He smiled, ravishingly. One foot tapped the floor, knee jogging the table between them, a boy’s reflex. She always forgot how young he was. Absently, she rubbed her arm. Safety Pin had been peeved at having to track down a prisoner; her grip as she walked Nan along the corridor to B Wing had been painful. Val glanced at her broad back, then leaned across the table toward Nan.