Lady Vanishes (3 page)

“Who’s—” Dora began. She rolled her wheelchair closer.

“She?” Cora finished. Her chair stayed put, but she leaned forward and eyed me suspiciously.

“Rachel. And Dash.”

“Why is she—” Cora said to her sister.

“Talking to us? We don’t—”

“Know her,” Cora finished. She shrugged her shoulders, rolled her eyes, and dismissed me with a flap of her liver-spotted hand.

“Know who?” Dora asked.

Cora looked at me, then back at her sister. “She’s taken every dime I have. Some daughter—”

“She is,” Dora said, nodding in agreement, Charlotte waiting at the door, Dashiell at her side.

“Hang around, ladies, I’ll see you when Charlotte and I get back.”

I poked my head into Venus’s office to tell her I was taking Charlotte out.

“Does she have her earmuffs?”

“She does.”

“Sound sensitivity,” she mouthed, making me feel pretty stupid for not looking beyond the surface. She probably wore the gloves so she wouldn’t have to touch unfamiliar things.

At the door, Charlotte took the leash from around her neck and hooked it to the D ring on Dashiell’s collar. Things like that were what kept me up at night when I’d worked with Emily, knowing that there was more inside than we could get to and not knowing how that could be changed, or if it could.

“Ready?” I reached for the doorknob.

“Where is she taking—”

“Lady?” Dora shouted.

“Some people have—”

“All the nerve. What is she doing—”

“Here anyway?” Cora asked no one in particular.

Leaving the Weissman twins for later, I opened the door, and we walked out into a wall of heat and noise. As fast as I could, I headed for Jane Street, hoping to get Charlotte away from the din, though she seemed oblivious to it. Perhaps she felt protected by the earmuffs, or was so happy to be out with Dashiell that nothing else registered. Suddenly she began to sing. Holding tight to the loop of the leash with one gloved hand, the other hand firmly in mine, a behavior I was sure she had been taught, she began singing, “Old McDonald had a farm, eeyieeyioooo,” again and again. Twice I sang the rest of the song, but she never changed her routine, as if that line were the only one she could remember.

I didn’t mind Charlotte’s repetitious, tuneless singing. I rather liked it because I knew it meant she was happy, but the noise of construction was getting to me, and I was concerned for Dashiell’s sound sensitivity as well. He wasn’t wearing earmuffs. When we got to Washington Street, it only got worse. A new building was going up on the corner, and the first of the evening’s delivery trucks was leaving the meat district, which ran from Fourteenth Street to about where we were standing, waiting for a chance to cross what the locals called “accelerator alley,” drivers in too much of a rush to consider the needs of pedestrians.

We headed for Hudson Street, leaving the noise behind us. Dashiell walked slowly, pacing himself to Charlotte, looking up at her with his goofy grin, already best of friends. I wondered if Charlotte, too, thought Lady was back, the way the twins did. Some puli he was, rolling from side to side as he ambled along as if he had nothing better to do, his short white coat revealing every rock-hard muscle, an anatomy lesson in motion.

On the way back, my hand sweating from Charlotte’s woolen glove, we came around the other way, on Twelfth, crossing the cobblestone street and approaching Harbor View from the south, as I had earlier.

There was music playing in the dining room. We turned right, toward Venus’s office. I could hear her through the closed door.

“Can’t you postpone beyond Friday?” A pause. Then “Me, too. Damn scared.”

When it grew quiet, I knocked.

“How did it go?”

“Fine. It got her singing.”

But Venus didn’t respond. “The service is going to be on Wednesday morning,” she said, speaking about Dietrich’s funeral in a way that Charlotte wouldn’t understand. “Are you free, Rachel? I’d like you to come with me.”

“I can do that,” I said, wondering what she was going to tell me later at the gym, wishing I knew what was going on here.

“Let’s go into the dining room for a few minutes. Samuel’s doing a movement class. It’s one of Charlotte’s favorite activities.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“Samuel Kagan,” she whispered. “One of Eli’s sons.”

Venus locked her office, took Charlotte’s hand, and headed to the opposite side of the lobby. I unhooked Dashiell’s leash, and we followed along behind them, stopping for a minute to look at the two closed doors next to Venus’s office, primitive drawings taped to the middle one, nothing at all on the other.

The doors to the dining room were open. Venus let go of Charlotte, who went to join the class, a bizarre tableau of movement and stillness in the center of the large room, the
tables and chairs all pushed against the walls. The man in the middle of the room could only have been Jackson. His clothes splattered with paint, he stood with his arms aloft as if he were a tree, his green hands the leaves reaching toward the sun. Very dramatic. Around him, the Weissman twins moved their hands in time to the music coming from a portable CD player that sat on one of the tables. And in various states of confusion and disarray, the oddest group of human beings I’d ever seen swayed and moved, some holding hands, some holding stuffed animals, or blankets, one holding a shoe, and now Charlotte, in her shorts and T-shirt, wearing red woolen gloves and white fur earmuffs, twirling around Jackson and singing “Old McDonald Had a Farm” at the top of her lungs.

But which one was Samuel? I was about to turn and ask Venus when I got my question answered. He was at the far end of the dining room, near the kitchen door, a short guy with a fringe of brown hair sticking out around a major bald spot. He had been gesticulating in such an exaggerated way that I thought he was one of the residents, but when he spotted Venus, he pointed to himself and then toward the kitchen, asking her to watch the class for a minute. When Venus nodded, he disappeared.

One by one, the kids spotted Dashiell. Some froze, faces expressionless, mouths hanging open, eyes blank. As if sleepwalking, they headed for him. Dashiell’s tail began to stir the air. He sneezed and cocked his head to one side.

There was an older woman with an aluminum foil crown on her head and a wand in one hand; a Down’s syndrome man, short and wide, his eyes fixed on Dashiell but his feet taking him nowhere, so stunned, it seemed, by Dashiell’s presence that he couldn’t move; a youngish woman the color of molasses, her black hair in a long braid that lay on the line
of her spine, a teddy bear in her hand, holding it out, her treasure, for Dashiell to take.

“Lady,” one of them said, a man of about thirty.

Or maybe he was fifty. Here, the old people looked young, the young ones looked old.

He dropped the shoe he’d been carrying and reached out for Dashiell.

Cora began to cry, having forgotten, I guess, that she’d seen him just half an hour ago. “She’s—”

“Back,” Dora said. And she began to cry as well.

They all gathered around him, fluttering, moaning, babbling, he the eye of a daisy, the residents the petals surrounding him.

When I heard something behind me, I turned. It was David.

He was standing in the doorway, looking up at the ceiling, his forefingers and thumbs drumming away, exhaling audibly, as if he were trying to speak.

I wondered if he’d been in the lobby all along, if when I’d come back with Charlotte, I hadn’t seen him—so still and quiet, he’d all but disappeared.

Leaving Harbor View, I crossed the highway and took Dashiell to the long, skinny park that ran along the river, a wide roadway, part of it marked off for bicycles and skaters, the rest for walkers, a line of benches facing the Hudson.

This used to be dog heaven, the only place in the neighborhood where a dog could be off leash and really run. Then the city designated the area a park and began to ticket off-leash dogs. Unhooking Dashiell’s leash meant risking a hundred-dollar fine, but after an hour and a half at Harbor View, it would have to be considered a necessary business expense.

We headed for the Christopher Street pier, where he could run and I could keep an eye out for the green trucks the rangers used to patrol the city’s newest park. At five-fifteen, I headed for Serge’s gym to meet Venus.

We crossed back to West Street at Eleventh, where there
was a traffic light, though if you wanted to make it safely across, you had to run. Heading north a block to Serge’s gym, I noticed again how broken up the sidewalk was, big fissures in the concrete because of the reconstruction of the roadway. In some places, cracks had been filled in with gravel, making walking there even more treacherous because the danger was now more difficult to spot and would be slippery whenever it rained. Why would anyone ride a bike here if they didn’t have to?

I began to wonder where the rider had been going when he plowed into Harry Dietrich. If someone was riding for pleasure, he would never ride on a broken sidewalk when there was a smooth bicycle path just across the road, a safe place to cross three short blocks away.

Was he a messenger, I wondered? But then, I thought, to whom would the messenger be delivering? Unless Harbor View was getting something, there was no one else on the block. In fact, most of the buildings on West Street had their entrances on the side streets, Bank, Twelfth, or Jane, not on West itself.

As for the Chinese food delivery theory, again, to whom would the food be going? Riding along on West Street would be the long way around for a delivery.

A lot of the delivery guys would cadge a nap at Westbeth. I’d seen them many times, sleeping on one of the wide, low walls that divided the courtyard, finding a spot in the shade of one of the trees. I’d throw the ball for Dashiell, watching him race by the sleeping delivery men, one of them waking up once, seeing a pit bull heading his way, ending his break one, two, three.

But they napped after a delivery, not before. I never saw one letting the food sit and get cold while he slept. And there were no Chinese restaurants along West Street. So leaving
the courtyard, they’d head back along Bank Street, toward Washington or Hudson, where the restaurants were.

Venus was waiting in the lobby, dreadlocks pulled back with an elastic band, wearing shorts and a workout bra, her midriff bare, big multicolored cross trainers on her feet. She was ready to work out, except for the necklace, a pavé diamond heart on a long gold chain. What an odd thing to wear to the gym. To each her own, I thought as she showed me where to sign in and waited while I tied Dash’s leash to the red metal bench near the front door. Then together we headed for the treadmills.

There was an arch in the wall to the right of the entrance so that, walking on the treadmill, I could see Dashiell and he could see me. What I saw after turning on the power and setting the speed was Serge bringing a green plastic basin of water for Dashiell, and though he’d just had a drink from the squirt bottle, I could hear him lapping over the sound of the music.

Venus and I began to walk on the moving belts, side by side, no one saying anything at first. There was a short, muscular man on a Stairmaster, also on the front wall, windows facing west, the traffic in front of us, the river beyond.

“Which way was that bicycle going?” I asked, breaking the silence.

“North,” she said. “It hit him on the right side of his chest. So he saw it coming.”

“But didn’t have time to get out of the way.”

“Maybe he didn’t realize—”

I nodded.

“He could have thought it was going to turn at the last minute.”

I nodded again.

Venus turned away for a moment, then began to fiddle with her treadmill, increasing the speed.

“Nothing much there,” I said, “to the north. Could be this incident was more on the intentional side than the accidental.”

“That’s what I’ve been thinking, too,” she said.

She took a sip from her water bottle.

I took a sip from mine.

I was on the corner treadmill, a window in front of me, one to my left. Looking south through the honeycomb iron grating protecting the window, I saw a delivery guy on foot, looking around, confused, checking the address on the fat manila envelope he was carrying, no one else on the street to help him out.

“What else makes you think it wasn’t an accident?”

Venus didn’t answer me, and I wondered if she’d heard me or if she was listening to the music Serge had on, a Billie Holiday song, the volume not set so high you’d lose your hearing, maybe thinking about the other Lady Day, the puli, wondering where she was. If she was.

I turned to look at her. She seemed to be concentrating, gathering up what she needed to say. Then she said it.

“What would you do if your life was in danger?”

“I’d go to the cops.”

“What if you couldn’t?” Turning toward me now, staring.

For a moment, I was the one gathering thoughts.

“You want to explain that?”

Venus nodded. She did.

“I was very lonely,” Venus said, “working hard at Harbor View, taking care of people, no one in my life to take care of me, take me out to a fine restaurant, tell me how pretty I was, hold my hand, call me darling, say I smell good, listen to my day, make me feel valuable. Oh, I felt valuable at work, of course. Don’t need anyone to tell me how good a job I do at Harbor View. But personally, it was bad. You know what I mean?”

“I do.”

“I thought you would. No one volunteers in institutions who doesn’t know what it’s like to feel left out of things.”

We each took a drink from our water bottles. I looked over at Dashiell, asleep on the cool marble floor.

“I have a computer at home. I do a lot of research on-line, see what I can find to help the kids. Sometimes I do the autistic chat groups. I’m not family, but I
feel
like family. I need the support, for sure, but it also helps me to hear the questions, the answers, the concerns of the parents. Sometimes someone stumbles onto something wonderful—that music can help a kid to learn, that some of the kids smile once in a while, that a kid began to talk when she was soaking in the bathtub, maybe the warm water relaxed her, but whatever it was, it was better than it had been before, an improvement. Or this other kid, a pacer, a bath at night helped him sleep better. Vitamins. Herbs. Acupuncture. Flower drops. Breathing exercises. Homeopathy. Massage. People will try anything to help their kids. Me, too. Cautiously, but me, too.

“Someone started a different chat group a while ago, nine, ten months back. It’s part of the autism web page, but it’s social. This one’s about us, the caregivers, not the kids. A lot of families, they have a kid this difficult, they split up. They can’t take it, maybe each one thinking it’s the other one’s lousy genes caused the kid to be so fucked up. So there’s a lot of people with a difficult kid, a kid needing supervision, patience, lots and lots of care, and now they’re alone, and sometimes they want to talk about something other than the kid, but to someone who’ll understand what their life is like.

“So now people get to talk about how much they love Indian food or going to a concert or playing tennis, everyone
saying what they like to do. But we all know we can’t do it, we can’t go out for Indian food, go to a concert, play tennis, we have to stay with the kid because no one else will, not for love or money.

“Of course, that’s not my problem, right? I can go home and forget all about it.

“Fat chance of that. Just like them, even though I’m not with it twenty-four hours a day, I’m stressed out. I’m drained. I don’t have the energy to go out and find myself a sweetheart. And even when I’m not dealing with these kids, I’ve lost my ability to make small talk, doesn’t seem to matter that they’re not mine, they inform my life as if they were.

“Not mine. Of course they’re mine. Who else is there to worry about them but me?” Venus was talking to herself, telling me her story at the same time, both of us looking beyond the traffic at the river, the light dancing on the water, a boat passing now on its way to the ocean.

“How do you get close to someone who doesn’t understand the peculiar strain of what you do all day, of what you’re devoted to? And Rachel, someone doesn’t know these kids, they could never understand.

“But just when I’m convinced this is it, forever and ever, I meet a man.”

“On line?” I asked.

Venus nodded. “On this chat group.”

The traffic light on Eleventh Street was red, the cars looking like the runners in the New York City Marathon, lined up, tense, waiting for the shot, see who’s the fastest one.

“It was like a miracle,” she said.

Meeting someone on-line, I thought, what does that even
mean?
On-line, it could seem like one thing, be something else entirely.

“After a while, we’re not in the chat room anymore, it’s just the two of us, staying up late writing long, long letters every single night, no exceptions, letting it all hang out, hopes and dreams and fears, nothing we couldn’t say.

“All of a sudden, everything’s different. Someone’s listening to me, and me to him, listening to my problems, saying I’m kind, and funny, taking my advice, giving me some too. And, you know something, Rachel, I’m not so lonely anymore. I got [email protected] to talk to.”

“No names?”

“No
real
names. Just made-up names we use on-line. That’s how it worked in the chat group, and we stuck to it. I never asked for more. Neither did he. We both had so much more than we’d had before. Why rush? Why be greedy when you already feel rich?”

“Weren’t you concerned?” I asked. “Meeting on the net, you wouldn’t know anything for sure. You wouldn’t know who he really was.”

“Who he was? Of course I knew that. I knew he was kind, intelligent, sad, but funny too. I knew he was warm. I knew he cared about me and that I cared about him. What else did I have to know?”

Lots, I thought. But I didn’t say so.

“I know what you’re saying, Rachel—that he could be a kid, fooling around, or a con artist, about to lay a big story on me and ask for money, or an old lady in a wheelchair, passing the time away on her computer; that nothing I knew was real, that I could get myself one big hurt doing this. But in a short time, I knew that there was nothing I could find out about this man that would change what I felt for him. Not one thing.

“And shortly after I knew I felt that way, that’s when he told me he was married.”

Fortune, a Jewish proverb says, is a wheel that turns with great speed.

But Venus didn’t look upset. She unscrewed the top of her water bottle and took a long drink. Then she hit the cool-down button on her treadmill.

“I have a meeting.” Very businesslike now.

She stopped the belt and shut off the power.

“I have to get back. I’ll see you tomorrow, at two-thirty, then again here at five-thirty, and I’ll go on with this.”

“Venus—” I said.

But before I got the chance to ask anything else, she was off the treadmill and on her way to the ladies’ locker room, leaving me alone, the belt of my treadmill moving rapidly along, me getting nowhere, fast.