The Year She Disappeared

by Ann Harleman

  The pretty borzoi was back, this time offering a tray of little white cardboard cups. “We have only one flower of ice cream,” she said, apologetically.

  Nan turned around to look through the crack again. Jane’s eyes were closed and her head drooped at an angle that could only mean sleep. Even asleep she looked hunched. Weary. A child—weary! Too many secrets to keep; too many partings. Nan turned and faced the front of the plane. There will be so much to repair, she thought. Restauro: the word in Italian sounded beautiful, like a campanile bell tolling.

  The plane began to move. Nan sat very straight, arms gripping her armrests, eyes on the window by her head. Between the ground and the horizon the band of blue widened. Above it, layers of smoky clouds with rose-tinted bellies flowed past. Walker’s hand covered Nan’s. It pinched the hole from the IV, but she didn’t move. His palm was cool; his fingers curled around hers and held them fast. She glanced past him, wondering if anyone would notice. Then she thought: Takeoff, after all, a moment when many people seize the hands of strangers, and a nun, what could be more fitting? Anyway, the seat next to Walker, the aisle seat, held only a cello. His, of course; part of the Plan.

  They were gathering speed. Ground, earth, trees flowed faster and faster, loosened, dissolved.

  “Someday,” said Walker into her ear, “we’ll look back on all this and … plow into a parked car.”

  Nan laughed, surprising herself. How long since she’d laughed? Walker’s eyes shone. He was a man needed, a man with a mission, an adventurer again at last.

  As always, the precise moment when they left the ground went unmarked. There was only the visceral thud of the wheels being pulled up into the belly of the plane. Nan felt her heart lift.

  “Beautiful!” Walker said. “We’re golden!”

  Epilogue

  Nan Mulholland pauses on the Passeggiata and bends to remove a shoe and shake out the cinder that has lodged there. Out over the dappled Mediterranean—so calm for an ocean, looking this December afternoon like pale green gooseberry jelly—the sun is moving down the western sky.

  It’s the time of day she loves best here: the approach of dusk, melancholy but hopeful. A drawing-in. She walks here every day in the late afternoon, two miles, from Bogliasco almost to Nervi and then back, for her heart’s sake. The Passeggiata—a wide, palm-lined, brick-paved path winding along the bluff above the ocean—is an old-fashioned turn-of-the-century promenade. Now, in mild December, the women wear furs (Nan has never seen so many, or such various, furs); the men stroll in pairs in checked golf caps and open coats. Children zigzag back and forth; babies ride pashalike in strollers. The sun strikes a shining path across the water from the horizon toward the promontory below. It’s her favorite spot—this last stark extension of the land into the sea, the dark, ribbed rocks, like great beasts reclining. On the farthest one, two fishermen stand companionably at the edge of the world.

  Nan checks her watch. Twenty minutes till she’s due to meet Jane.

  She can’t resist. Before she knows it she’s descending the steps cut into the bluff between wind-racked pines and feathery acacia. No railing: this is Italy, after all. She makes her careful, rubber-soled way out onto rocks encrusted with cream-colored bird shit, bright with moss. Around their jagged base the water, so calm and lakelike from above, shows its true nature. It foams, crashes upward, assaults the black granite.

  Exhilarated, Nan breathes in the postcoital smell of the sea and gazes out along the shining path toward the sun. A light breeze molds her skirt against her legs and urges tendrils of her hair out of its knot. She feels pleasantly conspicuous and a little dramatic, like the figurehead on the prow of a ship. Nothing but water between her and Africa.

  “E’ pericolosa—la bellezza!” calls one of the fisherman. It’s dangerous, this beauty. Slippery, he means. Only in Italy would a practical warning take the form of a philosophical statement.

  If she falls, she won’t drown. She’s a good swimmer now, after half a year beside the Mediterranean. She won’t die of hypothermia, either; the water is warm here, even in December, even when the air brushes your face with the faint fragrant chill of approaching winter. No—if she fell, she’d brain herself on the rocks sleeping beneath the surf. Beautiful, dangerous, and just right, Jane says, for mermaids. Do all five-year-old girls want to be mermaids? Jane has spent hour after hour this fall drawing blue and green scales on sheets of paper, taping them together, a long frail tube ending in a tail that invariably tears the minute she gets both legs into it. Her expression when this happens is ferocious, utterly unchildlike. Nan has learned not to approach her or try to comfort her then.

  Her new contact lenses let Nan see, far out on the water, diving gannets circle above a freighter. There’s a tanker that looks as if it’s made entirely of rust. Closer in, a lone kayaker pinwheels past, the silver flash of his paddle like quick stabs of happiness. Small brown birds that Walker says are called turnstones pick through the pebbles below Nan’s rock. No seagulls here, for which she never forgets to be grateful; their rusty, questioning cries always bring back the time in Providence. But they’re busy bombing the little harbor at Nervi, with its unlovely human detritus. Nan never walks quite that far.

  This little town of Bogliasco is near Genoa, where Nan, when they arrived half a year ago, felt sure Alex would be waiting. She wasn’t. The weeks went by without a word from her, and Walker, who thought Gabriel might try to sue for sole custody, wanted to be prepared. They were, after all, stealing Jane. He set Our Man in Savannah to work. Eventually Sam ferreted out Gabe’s secret—the one that Alex had referred to that December morning a year ago. A charge of cheating on his surgery boards, dropped because the eyewitness changed her testimony. An eyewitness who, Sam discovered, had been bribed. Gabe was warned (through what channels, Walker refused to say) that the whole matter —which could be proved, the eyewitness having been bought back by Sam—would be made public if he pursued Jane, legally or otherwise. Every now and then, Walker has told Nan, Gabriel is reminded—by a note, a phone call, the delivery (Sam has his whimsical side) of a rare orchid—that they have him in their sights. Pouring oil on troubled fires, Walker calls this cheerfully.

  Nevertheless, it’s best, he feels, for Nan and Jane to stay out of the country. No point tempting fate. “Nan and Jane” clearly means—without a word spoken, bless him—Nan and Jane and Walker. So here they are, approaching the anniversary of the day Nan and Jane fled Seattle, in a whitewashed terraced apartment on a hill above the ocean, under yet another assumed name, living in reasonable comfort on Deenie’s legacy. There is no greater misfortune than underestimating your enemy, Sam warned them on that summer night (how long ago it feels!) in Boston. But it is Gabriel, after all, who has made that mistake.

  I’ve lost a daughter—maybe, maybe—Nan thinks now, gazing down at the rocks, which the setting sun has turned deep lavender. I won’t lose Jane.

  Fifteen minutes now. She meets Jane every afternoon after school, at a little kiosk that sells postcards and cheap silver jewelry to tourists. The nanny of Jane’s classmate Claudia and her brother Francesco collects all three children from school and walks them this far. Jane loves the owner’s dog, a Lhasa apso with bright black eyes, one of the little, low dogs so popular here—what Walker calls “dropkick dogs.” She’ll shout Ciao! to her friends, Claudia and Francesco, farewells reluctant enough to reassure Nan that she is, really is, happy. Then the two of them will walk through a rain of church bells announcing five o’clock Mass, up steep cobblestone steps to the Via Aurelia, and make their way home. Like her grandmother, Jane prefers to cross the train tracks where it says VIETATO—Forbidden. Then: narrow streets, steep walls (laundry hanging bright against ancient stone), olive trees still holding on to their silvery leaves, with orange nets spread beneath to catch the season’s last fruit. The smells of cooking mingle with the fragrance of late-blooming roses. Doorways punctuate the high stone walls; the one just before theirs bears a rosette of blue ribbon f
or the birth of the young couple’s first baby. Then their own, with its carved head of Medusa, hair all snakes, two of them knotted like a Genovese woman’s scarf around her neck, two peering down benignly from her forehead. (Happy snakes; and the woman’s serene face is that of a madonna. It was this that made Nan and Walker choose the place.) In an upper window they’ll see Walker watching for them, looking, in his soft checked cap, almost Italian. A lizard will flicker down the blue-painted doorjamb and disappear between two crusted stones. Jane will hold out her hand for the key, heavy as a small wrench, and (this is her daily privilege) fit it into the keyhole, and turn.

  A last look at the shining path across the water, so bright and beckoning, so deceptively solid; then Nan climbs the stone steps back to the Passeggiata. The moon, a pale comma in the deepening blue sky, is the subject of conversation among her fellow strollers. How Italians love their moon! “Guarda, Mamma!” cries a bright-faced toddler, tugging at his mother’s hand. She smiles down at him. “Guarda la luna!”

  Sun and moon at once. It happens often on Nan’s walks along the Passeggiata. In Russia, Val told her when he and Mel visited in October, this is a good omen. She doesn’t remember ever seeing it before, back in what she’s come to call—as she and Tod did long ago, as everyone in the Foreign Service did—the States. The breeze has strengthened; it whips tendrils of hair against Nan’s neck, fills her nostrils with the tang of seaweed.

  Ten minutes now. Nan turns up the collar of her jacket and begins to hurry.

  Does Jane miss her mother? Her father? She never mentions them.

  “We will know that she heals,” says Jane’s therapist, “when we haven’t to ask ourselves these question. When she can miss them, and say it. When she can be angry to their loss.” Natalia Fabri is a deceptively soft-looking woman who once met Jung. She has a lower front tooth missing, replaced by a gold one that Jane calls her Halloween Tooth. “We haven’t to forget that separation from a loved one is a wound always. No matter how imperfect the love.”

  Natalia is motherly toward Nan, though she’s a few years younger. (Her own mother was executed by Mussolini days before the Allies landed at Salerno.) She smells, seductively, of the cigarettes Nan has almost given up; she bites her fingernails; she never tries to make herself feel better by giving Nan advice. No soaring generalizations from Natalia. Instead, she tells stories—about her own life, about the lives of people she knows—from which it is possible, should Nan desire, to extract a little wisdom. Or maybe compassion would be a better word. Natalia’s categorical pronouncements are few and concrete. Drink wine, never water, when you eat artichokes, or they will rust in your stomach.

  Nan sidesteps a young man talking excitedly into his cell phone, his telefonino, as they’re affectionately called here. “Cido le mani!” he is shouting. I’ll cut off their hands.

  If Gabriel were to kill himself, Nan thought when they first arrived in Italy—in those first weeks when her disgust and fury left no room for compassion—then she would know. It would be at once a confession of guilt and a self-administered punishment. Better still: dead, he would no longer threaten Jane (or—Be honest!—threaten Nan with the loss of Jane), even from a distance, even hypothetically. Headlines filled her dreams, those first weeks in Italy. PROMINENT SURGEON LEAPS FROM HOT-AIR BALLOON. BODY OF SEATTLE PHYSICIAN FOUND IN MOTEL. CARIBBEAN PLEASURE CRUISE PROVES FATAL. Nan is grateful not to need these headlines anymore. They were dangerous, not to Gabriel, but to Nan herself. Pop used to say, Bad luck follows the bitter heart.

  About the impossibility of knowing—about the uncertainty that lies at the heart of life—Nan is only beginning to be resigned. She’s long since stopped questioning Jane, but she has yet to give up looking (those mermaid tails!) for signs. She wrestles with the likelihood that she will never know for sure whether Gabriel abused his daughter. Or whether, if he did have sexual contact with her, either of them viewed that as abuse. Natalia Fabri says she has not known one child molester who did not speak of his victim with real tenderness; nor one abused child who did not go to great lengths to stay with such a parent. Aren’t Nan’s own feelings toward Gabriel, the son-in-law she once adored, irremediably mixed?

  Nan has a picture of Gabriel that will not leave her: Gabriel scoring the soles of Jane’s first pair of shoes, tiny white leather lace-ups. She sees his scalpel flash, a row of diagonals one way, another row across them, the careful diamond-shaped pattern that will keep his baby daughter from slipping. Nan hears the blade bite, over and over, into the smooth new unresisting leather, and Gabriel whistling a song from her youth.

  We won’t say goodbye until the last minute

  I’ll hold out my hand

  And my heart will be in it

  Five minutes now. She reaches the little kiosk, with its sign that says IL PIT-STOP, and sits down on a wooden bench facing the sea to smoke her one cigarette of the day. The owner’s Lhasa apso sidles over to sniff her ankles and gaze up at her with, Nan could swear, a question in its eyes. Where’s Jane? Giannetta, she’s called here. Dovè Giannetta? A small boy is kicking a blue ball back and forth. The sun, sinking toward the horizon, has stained the path to it a brilliant crimson. Evening comes early now, so near the solstice. People passing greet each other with “Buona sera!… ‘Sera!” Families walk in groups, mothers and fathers and children, interrupting each other, gesturing, laughing.

  As far as Nan can tell, Jane believes her explanation that her father and mother have had to stay in Guatemala, helping sick children. At any rate, she’s accepted it, and doesn’t ask about them, or about home. Home is here now. Her nightmares have almost stopped. Repair happens slowly, Natalia reminds her often; it comes alla spicciolata. Speck by speck. When Nan despairs (seldom now, but at first it happened with alarming frequency)—when she worries that Jane has been damaged forever, if not by abuse, then by the separation from her parents—Natalia helps her count the spiccioli of their life together. Nan teaching Jane to shout “Salami!” at careless motorcyclists who come too close. Walker and Jane spotting a stork’s nest in a cypress tree. Jane arguing in Italian with her friend Francesco, first shouting, then laughing. Jane emerging from the sea in her yellow bathing suit, water shining on round brown limbs, wild wet hair so like her mother’s.

  Alla spicciolata. Alex will know where to find them when she’s ready. Didn’t she find them in Providence? A notice appears in the Pee-Eye on the seventh and twenty-first of every month, only from Hippie to Pookie instead of the other way round, with a poste restante address in Genoa. Walker checks their box there once a week when he takes the train into the city to teach a course in ornithology at the technical college. Returning, so far—to Nan’s relief and his—empty-handed, he reminds her that things belong to the people who want them most. But it’s more than that—more than Nan’s own wish to keep Jane. It’s also that Alex entrusted Jane to her. Natalia has made real to Nan, via stories about the niece of a friend, the shame and horror and torment a mother feels whose child has been abused. A mother who has let this happen. “Allora, you see, your daughter has quite problems.” Natalia does not point out the extension backward of the chain, daughter to mother, daughter to mother, Jane to Alex to Nan. Crying, “Enough of all this broken-hearting!” she takes them both, Nan and Jane, to the corner gelateria for pistachio ice cream.

  Alla spicciolata. When it is hard—and it is often hard—to have, at Nan’s age, the raising of a young and willful and damaged child, she thinks: Tod would be surprised. Tod, who above all counseled patience, who never lived to be a grandparent. He would find Nan changed. Well—perhaps not. But improved? Bruised; battered; but improved.

  Oddly, she sometimes feels Tod’s spirit hovering over Walker. As far as anyone in Bogliasco knows, Nan and Walker are married. Walker would like to make good the lie; Nan hesitates. She wonders whether, after all, being the one loved, with all its warmth and safety, isn’t just a little dull. This makes her ashamed: Walker, with all his acts of light, toward her, toward Jane!
But Walker seems undismayed. He’s a man with a plan, a man whose reach exceeds his grasp—a happy man. The second thing Deenie left Nan in her will, he claims, was him.

  Real dusk now. The shining path is fading, reverting to mere water. Three young priests in black cassocks walk past arm in arm.

  “Ciao! Nonna!”

  Jane is hanging over the iron balustrade above Nan’s head, looking down. A breeze lifts her thick brown horsetail hair, grown long now, across her cheeks. Her face is shining. Claudia appears beside her; then Francesco. Three ordinary, happy children. They make a neat row along the balustrade; behind them an enormous palm tree spreads its sheltering fans, delicate but firm. The children wave in unison, hands cupped, then flying open.

  Nan feels drops of wetness on her upturned face. The children shake their wrists and more drops fall. She lets them stay, little sparks of cold across her cheeks, her forehead.

  “Ciao, teppistini!” she calls. Hi, little hooligans.

  In the last brilliant rays from the sinking sun, they squint down at her, feigning aplomb. Then they dissolve in laughter.

  Give me a child until he is seven, Saint Ignatius Loyola said, and I will give you the man. Imagining Deenie adding an “s” before “he” and a “wo” before “man,” Nan rises. She grinds the butt of her cigarette under one sneakered foot. Her heart beats lightly, steadily. She turns away from the darkly gleaming water and begins to climb the steep stone steps toward the children.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank the following people: Arnold Arem, M.D., Don Berger, Silvia Esposito, Laura Furman (fairy godmother), John Harbison, the late Ella Haring, Brendan Hobson, David Hobson, Sarah Hobson, Timothy Hobson, Ann Hood, Joanne Humphrey, Hester Kaplan, Sue Kelly, Linda Knight, Jarrett Krosoczka, Kathryn Lang, Frances Lefkowitz, Sally Mack, Ed Marques, Susan Mates, M.D., Dick Mc-Donough, David McOsker, Nancy Reisman, Roberta Richman, Angel Rocha, Bruce Rosenberg, Eric Rosenberg, Lois Rosenthal, Captain John Ryan, Caterina Sama, Janet Silver, Dabney Stuart, Randall White, Janet Hagan Yanos, and—with great affection—the members of the deep-hearted Providence Area Writers (PAW) group.