The Year She Disappeared

by Ann Harleman

  At the end of his life, when he’d finally begun to accept his death, Tod had talked a lot—wanderingly but with flashes of acuteness, the way people seemed to do under morphine—about the difference between guilt and regret. Guilt, he said, was in the camp of Fear; regret was in the camp of Love. Regret, Nan would think wistfully, wiping his wrinkled buttocks clean, wringing out his urine-soaked sheets: what a beautiful word, like the name of a flower. If only I could feel it.

  The two streams of people, Visitors and Prisoners, parted, each to their respective doors. Sunlight slanting through the lilacs gilded both impartially. Turning her head, Nan watched the last of the children disappear: the small boy in baggy shorts, Maria’s son, trailing his red kite. The Visitors’ Door slammed shut behind him. A terrible, invigorating grief seized her. She heard Val’s voice: One must know how to want.

  When they got inside she stood still. Ahead of her, at the end of the corridor, the old metal pay phone caught the afternoon light like a great square jewel.

  She thought, This will change everything. This will change my life forever. Our lives.

  She disengaged her arm from Marjorie’s. “You go ahead,” she said. “I have to make a call.”

  Seventeen

  “This one’s really off the hook. Gonzo!”

  “You never know. She might make it.”

  “Why don’t I ever catch a break? Hey—Doc Shovelton told me this joke? Three vampires walk into a bar.”

  “Yeah?”

  “The first vampire says, I’ll have some blood. Second one says, Make that two. The third one says, I’ll just have plasma.”

  “Yeah?”

  “So—the bartender says—that’ll be two bloods, and a blood lite.”

  Groans; then giggles.

  “Okay, I’m done here. Osmosis, amoebas! Ciao for now!”

  Nan opened her eyes.

  Here she was—again. The smells alone could have told her. Lysol, starch, urine. In the other bed a woman lay weeping, small, despairing sounds that were nevertheless audible over their two heart monitors and the other woman’s ventilator. (Tod had had such a machine, toward the end, before he’d persuaded Nan to take him out of the hospital so that he would not die there.) The woman’s hands clasped the air in little useless gestures. She had beautiful curly pure-white hair; her face, turned toward Nan with eyes shut, registered each new wave of weeping.

  They hadn’t been talking about Nan, then—the nurses.

  How did she get here? Oh—yes. The pay phone, in the basement of Dix Building. Standing there trembling, one hand cupped around the mouthpiece. Val greeting her “Okay, yes” with Slavic fervor. “This afternoon!” he shouted. “Will be big distraction!” She nodded, forgetting that he couldn’t see her, clinging to the knowledge that had burst upon her minutes before, in the yard, holding LaShon. A buzzer sounded, and one of the COs came up behind Nan and tapped her on the shoulder. The door to the outside slammed shut.

  God, she was tired—so tired—and weak. She remembered now: pretending to feel dizzy, nauseated; pretending to faint. Then the CO called Doc Shovelton. Whatever was in his syringe had made her black out, for real.

  So, she thought now, Val didn’t trust me to fake it. She went to wipe her mouth and felt her wrist jerked back: she was shackled to the bed frame. Her other hand, tethered to an IV whose needle pierced the back of it, was useless, too. Vinyl-coated wires tied her to the heart monitor. She tried to sit up but couldn’t. The handcuff would have slid far enough up the metal railing to allow it, but one ankle was cuffed to the foot of the bed. Her head filled with the white noise of anger. She kicked and flailed until the cuffs rang on the metal bed frame.

  Safety Pin, in full regalia including a gun in a shoulder holster, appeared. “Shut up!” she said, advancing toward Nan. “Shut the fuck up!”

  Defiantly Nan rattled her chains. Safety Pin held up a silver cylinder and stood beside the bed with her index finger poised above the button.

  “ASR. You want a hit of this? Because, trust me, I am authorized to give it to you.”

  Aerosol spray restraint: pepper spray. They aimed for your eyes, Marjorie’d said. Nan lay still.

  Safety Pin was very close now. She leaned over Nan, emitting—all the COs had it—a smell like mimeograph ink. All that metal, maybe: badges, cuffs, keys. Guns.

  “Grandma! Think you’re some kinda heroine. You may be an idol to the geeks in the ACI. You may have Doc and the Dolphin wrapped around your little finger. But you don’t fool me.”

  Nan raised a sardonic eyebrow. They couldn’t spray you for your facial expression.

  “That was a sweet trick you pulled. You and the Doc. Cyanotic, my ass! I done a EMT course before the Police Academy. You were no more havin’ a heart attack than I was. Hadn’t been that they were bringin’ in the mayor right then, you’d’a never gotten away with it.”

  The mayor? So that was what all the commotion had been about—Val’s promised distraction. Poetic justice, thought Nan, pleased with the idea. After all, it was the mayor who’d gotten her locked up in the first place. If it hadn’t been for that TV news footage—

  “You’re smilin’ now, but wait. Just wait.” Nan could see Safety Pin’s index finger tapping the button of the ASR can. She bent over until her face loomed inches from Nan’s, pitted cheeks pale with fury, like a big angry moon. “Just wait.” Her breath smelled like cinders. Nan shut her eyes. The only sounds were the cheeping of various monitors, the suck and swish of the ventilator.

  “Officer! What’s going on here?”

  Nan opened her eyes. Doc Shovelton stood in the doorway. No white coat, no stethoscope; only an unmistakable air of authority. Safety Pin had straightened up. She thrust the ASR can into her pants pocket and reached under Nan’s head to fluff her pillows.

  “How’s the patient?” The doctor smiled at Nan, came and sat down on the edge of her bed, grasped her free wrist between thumb and fingers. Safety Pin, suddenly the Uriah Heep of prison guards, stepped respectfully back. Shovelton’s hand was cool and firm, and his concentration—eyes cast down at his watch, silver beard faintly quivering—enclosed Nan in an invisible envelope of warmth and safety. When he’d finished, he laid her hand gently on her stomach and looked up at Safety Pin. Suddenly his face was luminous with rage. “Get these cuffs off!” His anger, like his beard, was biblical; he roared. “I gave strict instructions. No restraints on this patient. Get them off! Now!”

  Safety Pin scuttled—it lifted Nan’s heart to see—around the bed. The heavy bracelets split, ankle and wrist, and Nan was free. She struggled to sit up. Shovelton rolled her pillow and put it behind her and she leaned back, rubbing her wrist gratefully. In the next bed the old woman, no longer weeping, filled the room with dim snores. Shovelton got out his stethoscope, warmed it in his palm, and began to listen to Nan’s breathing, front and then back. Evading Safety Pin’s gaze, she kept her eyes on the other bed. The old woman’s sheet had pulled up, revealing her feet in blue hospital socks with the toes cut out. Nan felt an urge to tickle them. The doctor retied the strings at the neck of her johnny and gave her a quick pat on the shoulder, then motioned the now obsequious Safety Pin to follow him out of the room.

  Nan drew a grateful—a free—breath. Her ankle hurt where the cuff had rubbed it raw. Through the window she could see a single pale star in the twilight sky. It would be dark soon. She knew what came next, but not when it would come. She turned her head to the starched coolness of her pillow, and sleep took her. She dreamed of a long-ago camping trip in the Apennines, with Jack: a sky thickly salted with stars, cypress trees like folded black umbrellas, the sound of ravens at twilight.

  |

  Jarred awake by light, motion, the clatter of wheels, Nan thought, Now?

  But the wheeled gurney, the rustle of starched uniforms, the voices—these were for the woman in the next bed. A hand jerked the curtain closed around it. In the darkness the movement of figures made a furious shadow play against the canvas, acco
mpanied by clipped commands, the clap of cardiac paddles, the squeak of rubber-soled feet. Safety Pin (Does she never sleep? Where is her replacement?) appeared in the doorway, and she and Nan watched the spectacle together. It seemed to go on and on. Nan, still dreamy from the drug in Shovelton’s syringe, found herself on a road through the hills near Timisoara, a woman in a headscarf and hot-looking black stockings walking behind a horse, two coffins roped to its back, the bright new wood gleaming in the sun. At last the gurney was wheeled out of the room. The sheet covered not just the woman’s body, but her face.

  Safety Pin’s whisper was hot against Nan’s cheek. “Nobody ever ex-caped this way, ‘less they went out like her.”

  Nan lay still. Don’t give ‘em the satisfaction, Pop used to say. But after Safety Pin had gone, she was filled with misgivings. In the darkness the burble and peep of various monitors (which, despite the nearly palpable emptiness in the next bed, no one had turned off) seemed to echo the long-ago words of nun after nun. This is a fine mess you are in. How had she ever imagined this could work? Why had she agreed to this crazy jailbreak, the details of which she did not, even now, know? Why—when she knew that Walker’s tragic flaw, pointed out a month ago by Our Man in Savannah, was his optimism?

  And yours? the monitors wondered.

  Young, impetuous Nan Boyce. Older—oh, yes, older!—but no wiser, impetuous Nan Mulholland. Only this time she’d chosen, not just for herself, but for Jane. First, when she’d said yes to Alex all those months ago. Again, when she’d said no to Hold-’Em-Tight Wright. And a third time, standing in the little yard (was it only this afternoon?) of the ACI, with LaShon’s arms tight around her neck. Yes; no; yes. Accidents speak louder than words: one of Walker’s skewed sayings. Did desire speak louder than fear? Did it speak truer?

  This is my reparation to Alex. Making up for all those years when I was a lover, not a mother.

  Crap sandwich! from the monitors.

  All right—but I am doing this for Jane. To save her.

  From what? You don’t even know for sure what happened between her and Gabriel.

  I’m going to raise her, for God’s sake! Sixteen years till she’s through college. I’ll be seventy-six.

  You’ll be seventy-six in sixteen years anyway.

  Okay, I give up. I want her. I love Jane.

  They came flooding in, then—all the remembered moments she’d evaded during her week in the Lotusland of the ACI. Jane extending her hand, offering Nan a palmful of sweaty raisins, “For energy, Nana!” Jane laughing her smoky Marlene Dietrich laugh at one of Walker’s jokes. Jane on a crystalline winter day, in her puffy red parka, stamping her feet, snow boots punching through the crust of snow. “I’m not coughing. It’s coughing me!” A fierceness swept over Nan. Love, yes; but also something more primitive—savage, even. Things belong to the people who want them most.

  She smiled into the darkness. I’m doing now what I did then—what drove the nuns crazy. (The monitors chirped agreement.) I’m doing what I want.

  |

  Breakfast. Meds. The usual twelve-year-olds in lab coats demanding blood, perfunctorily overseen by Safety Pin’s replacement—a man this time—who stayed in his chair outside the door reading the greyhound racing form. A brief, cursory interrogation by the lone resident on duty this holiday weekend, a young Indian whose spicy aftershave cut right through the hospital smells.

  The hospital staff was less interested in Nan this time than they’d been in June—there was far less poking, prodding, bloodletting—and she wondered if that was because it was the Fourth of July or because now she was a prisoner. In any case, it was lucky, since who knew how convincing her symptoms might be. The room’s one window was at eye level. All day Nan watched the progress of a sparrow (or a wren: she always, to Walker’s amusement, got them confused) tending her young in a nest tucked between the window frame and the air conditioner. Unlikely place, thought Nan. And precarious: why hadn’t the noise of the machine or its vibration frightened her off, or a summer storm dislodged her?

  The day dragged interminably on. Back to Little Red Waitinghood again; and certainly Nan qualified as a Damsel in Distress. She was reminded of the months of waiting for Tod’s life to leave him. The same giddy suspension; the same stillness laced with longing, like the contradictory motion of dreams. At the very end, Tod had been unable to speak. He’d had a tracheotomy so as not to drown in his own fluids, and his jaw, stubbled with silver (he’d always, to his satisfaction, had to shave twice a day), was slack. He refused the priest, printing slowly and shakily on his little notepad, WHY SHOULD I LISTEN TO A LOT OF IRISHMEN? His hand searched across the flowered sheet for Nan’s. His lips moved; the tracheotomy tube wagged. Two words. Thank you, Nan had thought, at the time. Months later, it occurred to her that he might have said, Love you.

  All day the bed next to Nan’s stayed empty. In the late afternoon a nurse collected the old woman’s few possessions and bundled them into a clear plastic bag, turned off the monitors, escorted the IV stand out of the room. By then, silent and purposeful, the bird outside the window had finished feeding her young. From the nest fitted neatly into the sooty crevice one black eye regarded Nan, unblinking.

  Dinner arrived at last, pabulum in three colors, followed by something green and quivering called “gelatin jewels,” with splinters of carrot embedded in it, bright as shards of glass, exactly like the desserts of Nan’s youth; then visitors (none, of course, for Nan); then meds. The window became a square of mottled darkness through which Nan could hear the far-off popping of fireworks. Safety Pin returned to duty. She barked at the night nurse, a chipmunk-cheeked young man whose head tilted sweetly to one side. She sneered at Nan, who turned away and looked out the window, where an uncertain moon, not quite full, had risen. The wren or sparrow slept, head tucked under one wing, like a smooth gray stone in her nest. Nan could see a storm building, the sky beginning to fill with ornate tapestry clouds. A gibbous moon; a mackerel sky. Terms Walker had taught her.

  She shifted in the bed until the pressure on her bladder eased. Oh, for the simple pleasure of walking to the bathroom, even dragging her IV stand along, to pee free of chains! Impossible: she was still hooked up to the heart monitor. Safety Pin, hearing Nan’s movements, rose and stood in the doorway. Nan closed her eyes and lay still. Outside the half-open door the hospital sounds dimmed. She could hear rain ticking, slowly at first, then faster, against the window by her head.

  |

  In the kitchen the radio stays on during dinner, Perry Como, Julius LaRosa, then the news. Fire has broken out upstate; they’re digging firebreaks to the north and east of Philly. A woman dishes out green Jell-O, shuffling plates across the plastic lace cloth. The seat of Nan’s chair sticks to her bare legs; shifting, she makes a sucking sound. The woman goes to the refrigerator and comes back with a pewter pitcher of ice water. Nan reaches for it. “Honey, be careful—” The woman bites her lip and looks over at Pop. The pitcher, sweating coldly, is so heavy that Nan’s wrists feel as if they’re going to snap. Ice cubes thud into her cup, splashing her hands with cold tea. The pitcher wavers. Its handle starts to slide—

  My mother, Nan thought, half waking. That was her, that was my mother. Her face, no, I couldn’t see her face—but her hair, I saw that. Her bright yellow hair, the color of school pencils.

  The room, the bed, seemed to unmoor themselves and float. No restraints, she heard Doc Shovelton say. Sleepy again, she felt her heart unclench. No (almost asleep now) restraints.

  |

  Warmth trembling at the threshold of her ear. Waking to the hospital half-dark, the cheep of the monitors, a dim shape looming. Safety Pin?

  “Quiet. Tishina!” A whisper so soft it was hardly more than breathing. Smells: stale tobacco, Juicy Fruit. Val’s hand hovered near her mouth—Nan could feel its warmth in the darkness—but he didn’t need to use it. She was fully awake now, and silent.

  There was someone with him. The other man whispered, “Quick! The gu
rney!”

  A flashlight switched on. Nan was half pushed, half pulled from her bed onto the stretcher’s hard surface. The flashlight’s beam crossed Doc Shovelton’s face and settled on his hands. With quick, deft motions he unhooked the octopus of wires from Nan’s chest, pulled the IV needle from the back of her hand. Stoned with weakness—this was more movement than she’d been permitted for a day and a half—she simply lay there.

  D in D—that’s all I am now. Oh, Deenie!

  Shovelton covered her with a stiff cotton sheet. The flashlight switched off, and she felt Val tuck it into her hand under the cloth.

  “Ready? Okay. What to hell!”

  She heard the door open softly. The gurney began to move. She closed her eyes against the sudden rush of fear, bird leaving its cage, don’t want to, can’t—

  “Whaddaya think you’re doin’? Hold it right there!”

  Nan opened her eyes. The night-dimmed corridor lights showed her Safety Pin’s dark bulk, can of Mace upraised. “Get over there!” She gestured to Shovelton, at the foot of the gurney. “Stand next to him, and don’t fuckin’ twitch.”

  Moving very slowly, Shovelton began to obey. Safety Pin pulled the gun from her shoulder holster and stood at Nan’s feet, eyes shifting between the doctor and Val, who stood at Nan’s head. She paid no attention to Nan.

  I could faint, Nan thought, I know how to do that. But how would that help? She looked up at Val, couldn’t make out his face in the dim light. If only he had a gun, or a knife, or even a club. But of course he didn’t. There was nothing he could do, or Shovelton, either. Then she remembered. Underneath the stiff cotton sheet her fingers tightened around the flashlight. She lifted it very slightly, feeling it slip a little in her grasp. It was heavy.

  Can I?