Vanishing Acts

by Jodi Picoult

  "You mean this?" he says, but I turn away before I have to watch. "Or how you go ballistic if there's a spider web within a mile of you?"

  I turn to him, thinking. "Have I always been afraid of spiders?"

  "For as long as I've known you," Fitz says. "Maybe you were Miss Muffet in a former life."

  "What if I were?" I say.

  "I was kidding, Dee. Just because someone's got a fear of heights doesn't mean she died in a fall a hundred years ago."

  Before I know it, I am telling Fitz about the lemon tree. I explain how it felt as if the heat was laying a crown on my head, how the tree had been planted in soil as red as blood. How I could read the letters ABC on the bottoms of my shoes.

  Fitz listens carefully, his arms folded across his chest, with the same studious consideration he exhibited when I was ten and confessed that I'd seen the ghost of an Indian sitting cross-legged at the foot of my bed. "Well," he says finally. "It's not like you said you were wearing a hoop skirt, or shooting a musket. Maybe you're just remembering something from this life, something you've forgotten. There's all kind of research out there on recovered memory. I can do a little digging for you and see what I come up with."

  "I thought recovered memories were traumatic. What's traumatic about citrus fruit?"

  "Lachanophobia," he says. "That's the fear of vegetables. It stands to reason that there's one for the rest of the food pyramid, too."

  "How much did your parents shell out for that Ivy League education?"

  Fitz grins, reaching for Greta's leash. "All right, where do you want me to lay your trail?"

  He knows the routine. He will take off his sweatshirt and leave it at the bottom of the stairs, so that Greta has a scent article. Then he'll strike off for three miles or five or ten, winding through streets and back roads and woods. I'll give him a fifteen-minute head start, and then Greta and I will get to work. "You pick," I reply, confident that wherever he goes, we will find him.

  Once, when Greta and I were searching for a runaway, we found his corpse instead. A dead body stops smelling like a live one immediately, and as we got closer, Greta knew something wasn't right. The boy was hanging from the limb of a massive oak. I dropped to my knees, unable to breathe, wondering how much earlier I might have had to arrive to make a difference. I was so shaken that it took me a while to notice Greta's reaction: She turned in a circle, whining; then lay down with her paws over her nose. It was the first time she'd discovered something she really didn't want to find, and she didn't know what to do once she'd found it.

  Fitz leads us on a circuitous trail, from the pizza place through the heart of Wexton's Main Street, behind the gas station, across a narrow stream, and down a steep incline to the edge of a natural water slide. By the time we reach him, we've walked six miles, and I'm soaked up to the knees. Greta finds him crouching behind a copse of trees whose damp leaves glitter like coins. He grabs the stuffed moose Greta likes to play catch with--a reward for making her find--and throws it for her to retrieve. "Who's smart?" he croons. "Who's a smart girl?"

  I drive him back home, and then head to Sophie's school to pick her up. While I wait for the dismissal bell to ring, I take off the strand of pearls. There are fifty-two beads, one for each of the years my mother would have been on earth if she were still alive. I start to feed them through my fingers like the hem of a rosary, starting with prayers--that Eric and I will be happy, that Sophie will grow up safe, that Fitz will find someone to spend his life with, that my father will stay healthy. When I run out, I begin to attach memories instead, one for each pearl. There is that day she brought me to the petting zoo, a recollection I've built entirely around the photo in the album I saw several nights ago. The faintest picture of her dancing barefoot in the kitchen. The feel of her hands on my scalp as she massaged in baby shampoo.

  There's a flash, too, of her crying on a bed.

  I don't want that to be the last thing I see, so I rearrange the memories as if they are a deck of cards, and leave off with her dancing. I imagine each memory as the grain of sand that the pearl grew around: a hard, protective shell to keep it from drifting away.

  It is Sophie who decides to teach the dog how to play board games. She's found reruns of Mr. Ed on television, and thinks Greta is smarter than any horse. To my surprise, though, Greta takes to the challenge. When we're playing and it's Sophie's turn, the bloodhound steps on the domed plastic of the Trouble game to jiggle the dice.

  I laugh out loud, amazed. "Dad," I yell upstairs, where my father is folding the wash. "Come see this."

  The telephone rings and the answering machine picks up, filling the room with Fitz's voice. "Hey, Delia, are you there? I have to talk to you."

  I jump up and reach for the phone, but Sophie gets there more quickly and punches the disconnect button. "You promised," she says, but already her attention has moved past me to something over my shoulder.

  I follow her gaze toward the red and blue lights outside. Three police cars have cordoned off the driveway; two officers are heading for the front door. Several neighbors stand on their porches, watching.

  Everything inside me goes to stone. If I open that door I will hear something that I am not willing to hear--that Eric has been arrested for drunk driving, that he's been in an accident. Or something worse.

  When the doorbell rings, I sit very still with my arms crossed over my chest. I do this to keep from flying apart. The bell rings again, and I hear Sophie turning the knob. "Is your mom home, honey?" one of the policemen asks.

  The officer is someone I've worked with; Greta and I helped him find a robbery suspect who ran from the scene of a crime. "Delia," he greets.

  My voice is as hollow as the belly of a cave. "Rob. Did something happen?"

  He hesitates. "Actually, we need to see your dad."

  Immediately, relief swims through me. If they want my father, this isn't about Eric. "I'll get him," I offer, but when I turn around he's already standing there.

  He is holding a pair of my socks, which he folds over very neatly and hands to me. "Gentlemen," he says. "What can I do for you?"

  "Andrew Hopkins?" the second officer says. "We have a warrant for your arrest as a fugitive from justice, in conjunction with the kidnapping of Bethany Matthews."

  Rob has his handcuffs out. "You have the wrong person," I say, incredulous. "My father didn't kidnap anyone."

  "You have the right to remain silent," Rob recites. "Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning--"

  "Call Eric," my father says. "He'll know what to do."

  The policemen begin to push him through the doorway. I have a hundred questions: Why are you doing this to him? How could you be so mistaken? But the one that comes out, even as my throat is closing tight as a sealed drum, surprises me. "Who is Bethany Matthews?"

  My father does not take his gaze off me. "You were," he says.

  Eric

  I'm almost late to my meeting, thanks to the dump truck in front of me. Like a dozen other state vehicles in Wexton in March, it's piled high with snow--heaps removed from the sidewalks and the parking lot of the post office and the banks pushed up at the edges of the gas station. When there is just no room for another storm's bounty, the DOT guys shovel it up and cart it away. I used to picture them driving south toward Florida, until their load had completely melted, but the truth is, they simply take the trucks to a ravine at the edge of the Wexton Golf Course and empty them there. They make a pile of snow so formidable that even in June, when the temperature hits seventy-five degrees, you'll find kids in shorts there, sledding.

  Here's the amazing thing: It doesn't flood. You'd think that a volume of precipitation that immense would, upon melting, have the capacity to sweep away a few cars or turn a state highway into a raging river, but by the time the snow is gone, the ground is mostly dry. Delia was in my science class the year we learned why: snow disappe
ars. It's one of those solids that can turn directly into a vapor without ever going through that intermediate liquid stage--part of the process of sublimation.

  Interestingly, it wasn't until I started coming to these meetings that I learned the second meaning of that word: to take a base impulse and redirect its energy to an ethically higher aim.

  The truck makes a right onto an access road and I swerve around it, speeding up. I pass the deli that has changed hands three times in the last six months, the old country store that still sells penny candy I sometimes bring to Sophie, the poultry farm with its enormous shrink-wrapped hay bales stacked like giant marshmallows against the barn. Finally I swerve into the parking lot and hurry out of my car and inside.

  They haven't started yet. People are still milling around the coffee and the cookies, talking in small pockets of forced kinship. There are men in business suits and women in sweatpants, elderly men and boys yet to grow a full beard. Some of them, I know, come from an hour away to be here. I approach a group of men who are talking about how the Bruins are doing their damnedest to lose a spot in the playoffs.

  The lights flicker and, at the front of the room, the leader asks us to take our seats. He calls the meeting to order and gives a few opening remarks. I find myself sitting next to a woman who is trying to unwrap a roll of LifeSavers without making any noise. When she sees me watching, she blushes and offers me one.

  Sour apple.

  I work on sucking the candy instead of biting it, but I've never been a patient man, and even as I imagine it getting thin as an O-ring I find myself crunching it between my teeth. Just then there is a pause in the flow of the meeting. I raise my hand, and the leader smiles at me.

  "I'm Eric," I say, standing. "And I'm an alcoholic."

  When I graduated from law school, I had a choice of several employment options. I could have joined a prestigious Boston firm with clients who would have paid $250 an hour for my expertise; I could have taken a position with the public defender's office in a variety of counties and done the humanitarian thing; I could have clerked with a State Supreme Court justice. Instead, I chose to come back to Wexton and hang a shingle of my own. It boiled down to this: I can't stand being away from Delia.

  Ask any guy, and he can tell you the moment he realized that the woman standing next to him was the one he'd be spending his life with. For me, it was a little different: Delia had been standing next to me for so long, that it was her absence I couldn't handle. We went to college five hundred miles apart, and when I'd call her dorm room and get her answering machine, I'd imagine all the other guys who were at that very second trying to steal her away. I'll admit it: For as long as I could remember, I was the object of Delia's affection, and the thought of having competition for the first time in my life put me over the edge. Going out for a beer became a way to keep myself from obsessing about her, but eventually, that one beer became six or ten.

  Drinking was in my blood, so to speak. We've all read the statistics about children of alcoholics. I would have sworn up and down, when I was a kid, that I'd never turn into the person my mother had been--and maybe I wouldn't have, if I hadn't missed Delia quite so much. Without her, there was a hole inside me, and I suppose that to fill it, I did what came naturally in the Talcott family.

  It's funny. I started drinking heavily because I wanted to see that expression in Delia's eyes when she looked only at me, and it's the same reason I quit drinking. She isn't just the person I'm going to spend the rest of my life with, she's the reason I have one.

  This afternoon I am meeting a potential client who happens to be a crow. Blackie was wounded when he fell out of a nest, or so says Martin Schnurr, who rescued him. He nursed the bird back to health, and when it kept hanging around, fed it cold coffee and bits of doughnuts on his porch in Hanover. But when the crow chased a neighbor's kids, the authorities got called. Turns out, crows are a federally regulated migratory species, and Mr. Schnurr doesn't have the state and federal license to keep him.

  "He escaped from the place where the Department of Environmental Services was holding him," Schnurr says proudly. "Found his way back, ten whole miles."

  "As the crow flies, of course," I say. "So what can I do for you, Mr. Schnurr?"

  "The DES is going to come after him again. I want a restraining order," Schnurr says. "I'm willing to go to the Supreme Court, if I have to."

  The likelihood of this case going to Washington is somewhere between nil and nevermore, but before I can explain this the door to the office bursts open and there is Delia, frantic and crying. My insides seize. I am imagining the very worst; I am thinking of Sophie. Without even a glance at the client, I pull Delia into the hall and try to shake the facts out of her.

  "My father's been arrested," she says. "You have to go, Eric. You have to."

  I have no idea what Andrew might have done, and I do not ask. She believes I can fix this, and like always, that's enough to make me think I can. "I'll take care of it," I say, when what I really mean is: I'll take care of you.

  We didn't play inside my house. I made sure to get up early enough so that I was always the one knocking on Delia's door, or Fitz's. On the occasions that we settled at my place, I did my best to keep everyone outside, under the backyard deck or beneath the sloping saltbox roof of our garage, and that's how I managed to keep my secret until I was nine.

  That was the winter Fitz started to play league hockey, which left Delia and me alone in the afternoons. She was a latchkey kid--her father was always working at the senior center--something that never bothered her until we happened to see a TV movie about a twin who died and had his ring finger sent to his brother in a velvet box. After that, Delia didn't like being by herself. She started to come up with reasons to hang out at her house after school--something I was more than happy to do, if only to get out of my own. I always stopped off at home first, though. I had a hundred ready excuses: I wanted to drop off my backpack; I had to grab a warmer sweatshirt; I needed my mother to sign a report card. Afterward, I would head next door.

  One day, as usual, Dee and I split up at the fork in the sidewalk that divided my driveway from hers. "See you in a few," she said.

  My house was quiet, which wasn't a good sign. I wandered through it, calling for my mother, until I found her passed out on the kitchen floor.

  She was sprawled on her side this time, and there was a puddle of vomit under her cheek. When she blinked, the insides of her eyes were the color of cut rubies.

  I picked up the bottle and poured the bourbon down the sink drain. I rolled my mother out of the way so I could clean up her mess with paper towels. Then I got behind her and braced myself hard, trying to lever her weight so I could drag her to the living room couch.

  "What can I do?"

  It wasn't until I heard Delia's quiet voice that I realized she had been standing in the kitchen for a while. When she spoke, she couldn't meet my eyes, and that was a good thing. She helped me get my mother to the couch, onto her side, where if she got sick again she wouldn't choke. I turned on the TV, a soap I knew she liked. "Eric, baby, would you get me ..." my mother slurred, but she didn't finish her sentence before she passed out again. When I looked around, Delia was gone.

  Well, it didn't surprise me. It was, in fact, the reason I'd kept this secret from my two best friends; once they saw the truth, I was sure they'd turn tail and run.

  I walked back to the kitchen, each foot a lead weight. Delia stood there, holding a sponge and staring down at the linoleum. "Will carpet cleaner work even if it's not used on carpet?" she asked.

  "You should go," I told her. I looked down at the floor and pretended to be fascinated with the little blue dot pattern.

  Delia came closer to me, seeing the freak I truly was. With one finger, she traced an X over her chest. "I won't tell."

  One traitor tear slicked its way down my cheek; I scrubbed it away with a fist. "You should go," I repeated, the last thing in the world that I wanted.

  "Okay," Deli
a agreed. But she didn't leave.

  The Wexton police station is like a hundred other small-town law enforcement agencies: a squat cement building with a flagpole planted out front like a giant tulip stalk; a dispatcher so infrequently bothered that she keeps a portable TV at her desk; a nursery school class mural spread along the wall, thanking the chief for keeping everyone safe. I walk inside and ask to speak to Andrew Hopkins. I tell the dispatcher I am his attorney.

  A door buzzes, and a sergeant comes into the hallway. "He's back here," the officer says, leading me through the pretzeled hallways into the booking room. I ask to see the warrant for Andrew's arrest, pretending, like any defense attorney, to know far more than I actually do at this minute. When I scan the paper, I have to do my best to keep a straight face. Kidnapping?

  Indicting Andrew Hopkins for kidnapping is like charging Mother Teresa with heresy. As far as I know he's never even gotten a traffic ticket, much less been implicated in criminal behavior. He's been a model father--attentive, devoted--the parent I would have killed to have when I was growing up. No wonder Delia's so rattled. To have your father accused of living a secret life, when, in fact, he's been about as public a figure as humanly possible--well, it's insane.

  There are two lockups in Wexton, used mostly for DUIs who need to sleep off a bender; I have been in the one on the left myself. Andrew sits on the steel bench in the other. When he sees me, he gets to his feet.

  Until this moment, I haven't really considered him to be an old man. But Andrew is almost sixty, and looks every year of it in the shallow gray light of the holding cell. His hands curl around the bars. "Where's Delia?"

  "She's fine. She's the one who came to get me." I take a step forward and angle my shoulder, blocking our conversation until the sergeant leaves the room. "Listen, Andrew, you have nothing to worry about. Obviously this is a case of mistaken identity. We'll contest it, set everything straight, and then maybe even get you some money for emotional damages. Now, I--"

  "It's not a mistake," he says softly.