The Vanishers (33 page)

So I’d checked into Room 13, I’d taken a nap on the bed. Contrary to what many believe, rooms in which people have killed themselves are often the quietest rooms, unrattled by restless electrons. My mother’s bedroom was a neutral space, a psychic beigeness. I left Room 13 having experienced the same peaceful vacancy. Why Irenke had killed herself remained unknown to me, and just as well. Reasons were for the survivors. They did Irenke no good.

But after my trip to Room 13, Irenke began to let me visit her again in Paris, and pretty soon we’d developed a routine. Every morning we hung out for an hour, like friends meeting for coffee at
a local East Warwick café, though Irenke preferred to drink whiskey sours, a bad habit she’d earned the right to enjoy. We had one of those relationships that was organic and easy because we didn’t discuss the unpleasant things, and the refusal to do so was not viewed by either of us as an act of cowardice, nor did we view it as an indication that we were incapable of real intimacy.

Because I’d decided—this kind of hating, this kind of fault-finding, this kind of symbolic matricide, it had to stop. If I’d formed an allegiance with Irenke, it was because I’d decided that to befriend Irenke was to ensure that my mother’s death did not perpetuate more pointless, self-defeating rivalries among women who, in the end, were only killing themselves.

Besides, we had a lot in common, Irenke and I. We were sisters of a sort.

At the Workshop, meanwhile, my classes were a hit. I dated a variety of blue-collar, off-campus men. I even reconnected with my first boyfriend, James, which is to say that I started sleeping with him again, and we thought, for a week or two, that we were doomed to be a couple. But he was a bit of an emotional mess, his own mother having recently died of something prolonged and horrible, the length of which had enabled him to have too many wrenching conversations with her about how she missed both what hadn’t happened to her yet and what had happened to her already with equal vividness. Her dying, she said, made her miss James’s childhood and the childhood of his unborn children in the exact same moment, with the exact same nostalgic intensity, which had rendered her life both timeless and collapsed, an immortality in which she existed forever or a grave into which her past, present, and future disappeared. This sort of talking had undone James, and it also, even when related to me secondhand, for reasons I couldn’t pinpoint, undid me. We decided to part ways before we overrode our old good memories of one another with new bad ones.

But my illness, even in its absence, made it hard for me to enjoy life. Good health means being unaware of one’s health. I was not yet unaware. I visited a number of physicians in the area, all of whom pronounced me
fit as a fiddle
. If it had been difficult to convince my former doctors of the medical validity of an illness comprised of many contradictory symptoms, it was even harder to convince these doctors of an illness whose only symptom was a complete absence of symptoms.

I consulted Professor Yuen, who was sympathetic.

“It’s not easy to do what you do,” Professor Yuen said. As far as she was concerned, I was still attacking Madame Ackermann.

She recommended that I visit Patricia Ward.

Patricia Ward lived in a winterized cottage, part of a twenties vacation development called the Occum that included a pond, a shingled club house used for staid second weddings, and a five-hole golf course.

“Patricia Ward,” she said, giving my hand a hard, efficient shake.

Patricia Ward was too tall for her own house, her hyperbolic blond hair near-skimming the rafters as she walked me to her office, a small room off the kitchen that looked out, through multipaned windows, at a tangle of burdock. She wore severe black glasses, jeans, and a shrug made of linen and tie-dyed in a muted way that whispered, “pricey tribal.”

My resistance to Patricia Ward intensified when she led me into her study.

Two black Barcelona chairs faced off over a glass coffee table.

“Sit,” she said, gesturing to one of the Barcelona chairs. The leather cricked when my bottom hit it. I winced.

“Are you comfortable?” she asked.

“Very,” I said.

She smiled.

I smiled.

I noticed the video recorder on a tripod.

“Is that on?” I asked.

“It can be,” she said.

“But it’s not currently on,” I said. I wanted no more recordings of me that I could not control.

“Not currently,” she said. She turned it on to demonstrate. She turned it off.

“See?” she said. “I do, however, prefer to videotape my clients. It’s a process thing with me. Also a legal thing.”

“Maybe we can work up to it,” I said.

She flipped through my Workshop medical file, sent to her by Professor Yuen.

“Do you mind if I ask what you do?” I said.

“Do?” she said. “Didn’t Karen tell you?”

Professor Yuen had not.

She handed me a business card that read PATRICIA WARD, SPIRITUAL MIDWIFERY.

“I’m not pregnant,” I said, trying to return the card. Patricia did not accept it.

“I’m a
spiritual
midwife,” she said. “Primarily I birth stillborn emotions, the fetal remnants of bad pasts. But sometimes I help people birth their true self from within. Sometimes the person you are now is the mother to the future you.”

A tiny mobile device rang on her side table. She picked it up, glanced at the screen.

“Excuse me for a moment,” she said. She texted with her thumbnails.

“Thank you for your time,” I said. “I don’t think spiritual midwifery is for me.”

Extricating myself from the Barcelona chair required me to roll to my right side, lift my ass in the air, push to a standing position. Among the countless hostile design elements of the Barcelona chair, it featured no armrests.
These fucking chairs
.

I straightened my legs. A wave of nausea knocked me back down.

(I tried not to get too excited about this; a stomach flu had been making the rounds.)

Patricia replaced her phone on her desk.

“There!” she said. “Do you need some water? You’re green.”

“No water,” I said. “I just need to go home.”

“You know what Robert Frost wrote,” she said, opening a door to a half bath. “ ‘Home is where, when you go there, they have to let you in.’ ”

Water battered a tiny basin.

“The cheap platitudes of art,” she said. “Home is the oven where you stick your scared little head.”

She reappeared with a Dixie cup.

“Then again,” she said, waving my file, “when the home teems with emotional vermin, sometimes it’s best to return and hire an exterminator.”

“That would be you?” I asked.

She flipped her glasses into her hair.

“Your mother,” she said.

“My mother is the exterminator?”

“No,” Patricia said. “Your mother is the gift. Your stillborn gift. Death is a gift to some people. Death was a gift to your mother. But is death a gift to you? It might be, if you can’t give birth to this dead baby mother. But my point: you have options.”

The urge to vomit tsunami-rushed my esophagus. I tamped it back.

She flicked on the video camera.

“Tell me about her,” she said.

I stared into the camera’s eye, determined to give it nothing.

“She’s dead,” I said.

“But not really,” Patricia said.

“Yes, really,” I said.

“She lives in you,” Patricia said. “Decomposing in you. Poisoning you. Attacking you.”

I flashed to that rainy afternoon in the Carpathians, and my encounter with the wolf that had peripherally revealed a dark-haired woman.

“Attacking you,” Patricia repeated. “And yet you blame innocent people for your illness. Why? Because she’s your mother. She would never do anything to hurt you. She doesn’t even know you. A person so uninterested in you couldn’t be the cause of your sickness. In order to want to hurt you, a person has to care.”

“Fuck you,” I said.

“Consider it,” she said. “Consider how you’ve brought this on yourself.”

“I’m leaving,” I said.

“The sick are never blameless,” Patricia called after me. “Remember that when you stick the pistol in your mouth.”

I stumbled toward the front door. Why would my mother attack me? Neglect was one thing, but targeted hostility? Then I heard in my head
—you’re the hostile one
. And maybe I was. Maybe what I’d interpreted as her inattention, she’d interpreted as mine. And wasn’t it true? My search for her had never been a search for her; I’d been searching to feel what I knew I should, by biological rights, feel, but couldn’t. Grief, basically, or a variety of grief—one that didn’t involve missing a person, one that was far more self-involved. A grief over a grief.

I made it as far as the road before vomiting. I did so discreetly,
behind a tree. Afterward I covered the vomit with dirt. Because I was polite even when incapacitated, I thought. Because I was such a decent person that I didn’t want to inconvenience anyone, not even Patricia Ward. But as I scuffed the dirt over my vomit, my patch of shame, I felt less like a highly evolved human than a dying animal, covering its tracks so that it could expire with dignity under a rock, alone.

Toward the end of September, I received an e-mail from Colophon. He’d landed at a university in Lyon, a yearlong scholar-in-residence position at their film studies department, a sinecure he seemed to find beneath him.

He included a link at the bottom of his message. No explanation.

I didn’t follow the link, and soon forgot about it. I had a faculty meeting that day. That night I was hosting a student party at my apartment and I’d been tasked to find eclectic bitters for my volunteer mixologist, a scholarly alcoholic named Klaus.

The following day, I was busy being hungover, a state of self-induced illness I’d been experimenting with more and more. My father and Blanche arrived that afternoon for a weekend visit, the two of them in a throbbing marital huff. That night we ate dinner at a French inn-restaurant. After the wine arrived, my father handed me a skinny box.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“I found it,” he said.

“He didn’t find it,” Blanche said.

My father glanced at her stonily.

“What?” Blanche said. “You didn’t find it.”

“It was mailed to me,” he said.

“By whom?” I asked.

“It arrived in the mail after you moved back to East Warwick,” Blanche said. “No return address.”

I opened the box.

Inside was the pendant made by my mother, purchased by Varga, stolen by Irenke, returned to Varga. The surfaces had a molten rumple to them, like metal just pulled from the forge.

“Your mother made it,” Blanche announced. “See? Ugly.”

Each sinew furled to a menacing point. I pushed against one with my fingertip. Hard. I didn’t break the skin. But I could have.

It was as hostile an object as I’d ever touched, and yet I experienced with it an instant kinship. Despite the long line of tragic women who’d owned it, it seemed to have always belonged to no one but me.

I slipped my head through the chain. The pendant hung to my navel, and was so heavy it pulled on my shoulders, dragging me downward. I closed my eyes and imagined: this is what it felt like to be her, or to be around her, or both.

“Was she always unhappy?” I asked.

“Depression ran in her family,” Blanche assured me.

“I could never tell if she was happy or unhappy,” my father said. “I suppose that says something not very flattering about me.”

My father stared into his wineglass.

“She was emotionally remote and impossible to read,” Blanche, the old dog, said.

My father made a wall of his hand; he showed it to Blanche.

“I’m sorry,” he said to me. “I can’t ever seem to tell you what you want to hear.”

“You shouldn’t worry about what I want to hear,” I said. “You should just tell me what you want me to know.”

I placed my palm against his, the one he’d erected as a Blanche
silencer, and our hands hovered there, supported by our elbows on the table. We might have been arm wrestling except we neither of us pushed against the other. We held our own weight.