Vanishing Acts (14 page)

“Don't we all,” I say, and gun the engine as the light turns. I pass a plethora of child-care centers–the hallmark of a town whose inhabitants have to pawn their kids off on someone else so they can be teachers and nannies and cops in upscale neighborhoods where they can't afford to live. There is shack after shack of Mexican fast-food places–Rosa's, Garcia's, Uncle Tedoro's. Many of the storefronts boast of sales in English and Spanish.

Just past a conversion van on the side of the road that's selling leopard-print dashboard covers, I see a trailer park–stubby silver Airstreams huddled like a crash of rhinos. As I am wondering which of these Quonset huts might belong to Delia, Sophie comes running out of a door. Her red sneakers kick up dust as she races to another trailer, this one covered with Christmas lights and feathers and windcatchers. If she's sick, she sure doesn't look it.

“Sophie,” I yell, but she's already disappeared inside the second home. I park my car and walk up to the trailer. There is no doorbell, only the kind of triangle that ranch wives use to call cowboys to dinner. I raise the wand and ting it, just a little. The door opens, revealing a Native American woman with a scarf wrapped around her head. “I'm sorry,” I say, so surprised to not see Delia that I cannot find any words for a moment. “I must have the wrong address.” But then Sophie pokes her head out of what must be a closet. “Fitz!” she yells, and comes at me with the force of a natural disaster. “If I stand on Ruthann's toilet I can touch all the walls in the bathroom at once. Want to see?” The Indian woman frowns at Sophie. “I thought I hired you to work for me, not to go stand on toilets.”

Sophie beams. “Ruthann's paying me a dollar to glue the sequins on One-Night Stand Barbie's miniskirt.”

“One-Night Stand Barbie?” I repeat.

“She's my featured item this month,” Ruthann says. “Comes shrink-wrapped with Rohypnol Ken. For you, only $29.99 for the pair.” She gestures to the small foldout table in the center of the tiny room, covered with beads and glitter and plastic dismembered body parts stacked like a mass grave. Sliding heavily into the bench seat, she pulls a pair of spectacles out by a cord that snakes into her shirt and starts assembling arms and legs and torsos into dolls. “Nine ninety-nine?” she bargains.

I take a ten-dollar bill out of my pocket and slap it on the table. Ruthann slips the money into her jeans and hands over the dolls. “She's not here, you know.”

“Who?”

She raises an eyebrow, and her fingers fly over a Barbie head, braiding the hair. I let my gaze roam the trailer, which is packed to the gills with dusty old appliances, heaps of vintage magazines, smashed toys, and bald or filthy or amputee Barbies.

“I'm Fitz,” I say, a belated introduction.

“I'm busy,” Ruthann replies.

“Ruthann sells stuff that other people throw away,” Sophie says. I have always wondered about the people who cruise the streets before the garbage trucks come, taking stained couches and broken bicycles from the rubbish piles. What some people cast off, I guess, other people would want to keep. Ruthann shrugs. “Some fools will buy anything made by an Indian. I could probably rearrange my own trash and say it's art, get myself a show at the Heard Museum.”

“I went to the hospital today,” Sophie says. “I was sick when I woke up but Ruthann got rid of the feathers and now I'm better.”

I look at the old woman for explanation, but she just shakes her head. Whatever was wrong with Sophie must have passed; she's perfectly fine now.

“Where's your mom, Soph?” I ask, but she shrugs. No one seems inclined to talk. I clear my throat, and fiddle with an arm. It looks like it belongs to Ken; it has a biceps muscle.

Ruthann tosses me a torso and a head. “Knock yourself out.” I start to put together a Ken, stopping only once to notice the lack of genitalia, and wondering why I never knew that Ken was a eunuch. Probably because the only girl I'd ever played with was Delia, and she wouldn't have been caught dead with a doll in her possession. When the body is assembled, I pick up a Sharpie marker and begin to draw dotted lines and symbols down the torso and over the extremities. I label spots:

BAD LUCK. SEARING PAIN. SEXUAL DYSFUNCTION. MONETARY RUIN.

Sophie cranes her chin over my arm. “What are you making, Fitz?” “Something for your mom. Voodoo Eric.”

Ruthann laughs, and when I look up I see her measuring me differently. “You,” she decides, “may turn out better than I thought.” Just then the door opens, and I can see Delia tying Greta's leash to the arm of a large plaster garden gnome. “Stay,” she instructs. When she walks inside and sees me, her face lights up. “Thank God you're here.”

“Thank Southwest Airlines. They had more to do with it.”

“Ruthann,” Delia says, presenting me, “this is my best friend in the world.”

“We've met.”

“Yes, Ruthann was kind enough to let me discover my inner artist.” I lift the doll and give it to Delia. “It might come in handy. Listen, do you think we could go somewhere and . .. talk?”

I look around as I say this, but I can literally see the end of Ruthann's little trailer from where I'm standing. I can practically touch the end of Ruthann's little trailer from where I'm standing. “Go on,” Ruthann says, waving us away. “Sophie and me, we're busy.”

But Delia leans over and feels Sophie's forehead with her lips, an act I've never understood. Do all mothers automatically have some kind of thermometer gauge in their mouths? She turns to me. “This morning–”

“I heard.”

“I couldn't even reach Eric to have him meet us at the hospital–”

“I know,” I reply. “He told me he tried to call you on your cell.” Delia looks at me sharply. “You saw Eric already? You went to the law office?” I shift uncomfortably. I think about the notes I have in my back pocket, about the arraignment. The ones I will write up and send in an e-mail to the New Hampshire Gazette. “I ran into him in court. Your father was arraigned about an hour ago.” Delia shakes her head. “I don't understand. Eric would have called me.”

“I don't think Eric knew your father was going to be arraigned. He nearly missed the whole proceeding.”

She wanders outside the trailer and sits down beside Greta in the shade. “I got mad at him last night.”

“Eric?”

“My father.” She draws up her knees, rests her cheek on them. “I went to the jail to tell him I would testify or do Whatever he needed me to do. I wanted to hear the truth, but when he started to tell it to me, all I could think about was how he lied. So I left.” Delia glances up, near tears. “I walked out on him.” I rest my hand on her shoulder. “I'm sure he knows how hard this is for you.”

“What if he thinks that the reason I wasn't in court was because I hate him?”

“Do you?”

Delia shakes her head. "It's like math that doesn't add up, you know? I mean, on the one hand, there's my mother, who's ... out there, somewhere, which is amazing

. . . and I can't ever get the time back with her that I lost. But on the other hand, I had the best childhood, even if it wasn't the one I started out with. My father literally gave up his life for me, and that's got to count pretty heavily.“ She sighs. ”You can love a person and still hate the decisions they've made, can't you?“ I stare at her for a moment longer than I should. ”I guess," I say.

“I still don't know why he did it,” Delia murmurs.

“Then maybe you ought to try asking someone else.” She turns to me. “I was going to ask you about that. I keep hitting dead ends. I didn't get a chance to ask my father for my mother's real maiden name when I was at the jail–I got too upset first. And I tried calling the City Hall records department and explaining, but they said that without it, they couldn't–”

“Give you this?” I reach into my back pocket and pull out a piece of paper. I watch Dee read the unfamiliar address and phone number. “The first class in Journalism School is How to Charm a Records Clerk.” I explain.

“Elise Vasquez?” she reads.

“She remarried.” I hand her my cell phone. “Go ahead.” Hope holds her frozen for a moment, and then Delia reaches for the phone. She punches in the Scottsdale area code before suddenly aborting the call. “What's the matter?” I ask.

“Feel this,” she says, and she takes my hand and holds it just north of her heart. It is racing, fluttering as fast as a hummingbird's flight, as fast as indecision, as fast as my own. “You're nervous,” I tell her. “Given the situation, that's pretty normal.”

“I'm not just nervous. Remember what it used to feel like, as a kid, the week before your birthday? Remember how all you could think about was the day of your party, and then when it was finally time, it wasn't nearly as amazing as you'd built it up to be?” Delia chews on her bottom lip. “What if it turns out like that?”

“Dee, you've been wanting this moment your whole life. If there's any bright side to this whole nightmare, this is it.”

“But why didn't she want it, too?” Delia asks. “How come she didn't try to find me sooner?”

“For all you know, she's been looking for twenty-eight years. She didn't know your name until two days ago.”

“Eric said that she might not have been the one pressing the authorities,” Dee points out. “The state might have done that on its own. Maybe she has a new life, with new kids. Maybe she doesn't care whether or not I've been found.”

“And maybe when you get to see her, you'll realize it's an alias and she's really Martha Stewart.”

She smiles crookedly. “Two felons as parents. What are the odds?” Hunching down, she buries her fist in the ruff of fur at Greta's neck. “I want this to be perfect, Fitz. I want her to be perfect. But what if she's not? What if I'm not?” I stare at the clear amber of her eyes, at the careful curve of her shoulder. “But you are,” I say softly.

She throws her arms around me; I string this feeling beside the other hundred memories I have of her touching me. “I don't know what I'd do without you,” Delia says.

I answer that rhetorical question silently. Without me, Delia would not have her family trauma splashed across the pages of the New Hampshire Gazette. Without me, she would not have any reason to believe I'm here for more than her moral support. Without me, she wouldn't have another heartache coming. When she pulls away, her face is shining. “What do you think I ought to wear?” she asks. “I don't know if I should call first–no, I think I'll just go there. That way, I get to see her reaction . .. can you watch Sophie for me?” Before I can answer, the door of the trailer slams behind Dee. Greta looks up at me and beats her tail against the ground. Like the bloodhound, I've already been forgotten.

I take my notes from the arraignment out of my pocket, rip them into bite-size pieces of confetti. I'll tell my editor that my flight was delayed, that I got lost en route to the courthouse, that I was stricken by the stomach flu, whatever. I toss the handful, imagine them blowing into the desert.

Instead, though, they blow over the gate of the trailer park, onto the sidewalk. They hit a man standing on the street; a freak snowstorm of regret. I call out an apology, and realize it is the same vagrant from the highway exit. He's carrying his cardboard sign, holding it up to the cars that speed by: need help. This time I walk right up to him. “Good luck,” I say, and I hand him a twenty. Ill

Nothing stands out so conspicuously, or remains so firmly fixed in the memory, as something which you have blundered.

–Cicero

Delia

If you think motherhood is an instinct, you'd be wrong.

In college, when I majored in zoology, I wrote my thesis on the way offspring can identify their mothers, and vice versa. Instinct, as it turns out, isn't denned as a trait you're born with, but one that develops as a parent and child bond. There's that famous Konrad Lorenz study–the scientist who had goslings trailing after him, because he allowed them to imprint on him when they hatched. I tracked hyenas and wild pigs and seals, all of whom used vocal clues and pheromones and physical resemblance to pick their mothers out of a crowd.

Attentive mothers tended to be the ones with the most helpless babies: humans and chicks and mice. On the other hand, fish, who could take care of themselves at birth, were left behind immediately by their mothers. In this sense, parenthood became solely about defense.

But every now and then I'd come across an anomaly, an instinct gone awry. Like the cuckoo, which would invade another bird's nest, throw out the real eggs, and leave its own behind to be reared by a surrogate parent. Or the seal pups that were abandoned when food went scarce. Or Neanderthals, who killed their young if the alternative was starvation. Sometimes, when conditions leave no other choice, parental instinct falls by the wayside.

Years later, I read that someone had found genetic components to good motherhood. The Mest and the Peg3 genes occur on chromosome 19, and, ironically, they only work if they're inherited from the father. Imprinting like this usually occurs in evolution because of a genetic battle of the sexes; it's in the best interests of the female to have more litters, but it's in the best interests of the male to protect the child that's already been born.