Vanishing Acts (16 page)

“Grandpa tells me his secrets,” Sophie says, and we both look over toward the couch. She's sitting up now, her face still rosy with sleep. “Is he here yet?” I sink down beside her and haul her onto my lap. There are so many times that I've been seized with a need to hold Sophie–after a particularly sappy movie, after a near-miss car accident in an ice storm, when I'm watching her sleep–what would it be like to have someone take that right away from me? “What secrets does Grandpa tell you?” I ask.

“That he bought the cheap grapes at the supermarket, even though he told you they were the organic ones. And that he's the one who put your white shirt in the washing machine and turned it pink.” She turns to me. “I don't know if Grandpa's going to fit in this house with the rest of us.”

I look at Fitz. “Grandpa isn't going to be staying with us,” I tell Sophie. “You know how the police came to the house the other day?”

“You said they were playing a game.”

“Well, it turns out that they weren't, Soph. Grandpa made a big mistake, one that hurt a lot of people. And because of that, he has to go ... he's going to stay . . .”I try, but I cannot summon up the words.

Fitz kneels in front of us. “You know how you got a Time Out when you threw the tennis ball in the living room and broke the window?” Sophie nods. “Your grandfather has to live for a while in a place where grown-ups go when they get Time Outs.”

Sophie looks at me. “Did he break a window?”

No, I think. Just my heart.

“He broke the law,” Fitz says. “So for now, he has to stay in jail until a judge says he can leave.”

Sophie considers this. “Bad guys go to jail. They wear handcuffs.”

“He's not wearing handcuffs and he's not a bad guy,” I tell her.

“What did he do?”

“He took a little girl away from home,” I say.

“Didn't her mother tell her not to talk to strangers?” How do I tell Sophie that sometimes it's not strangers that prey on us; it's those we love who can do the most harm? “It happened a long time ago,” I explain. “And I was the little girl.”

“But he was still your daddy, right?” Sophie shakes her head. “Daddies are allowed to take you places.”

“Not this time.” I feel my throat close like a fist. “I didn't get to see my mother, not for lots of years–and I really missed her.”

“Why didn't you just tell him you wanted to go home?” It is too complicated to explain it all to Sophie. That there were lies involved, and aliases. That people you love don't usually come back from the dead. That I couldn't tell my father I wanted to go home because I didn't know I was missing. But now I do.

On the drive back to the Madison Street Jail, I wonder if Sophie will remember this trip to Phoenix when she gets older. I wonder if she'll be able to picture the short spikes of a prickly pear, like stubble on a woman's leg; if she'll know her grandmother; if she'll have any memory of her grandfather before he was imprisoned.

The truth is, she won't have to.

That is my job. What is a parent, really, but somebody who picks up the things a child leaves behind–a trail made of stripped-off clothing, orphaned shoes, tiny bright plastic game pieces, and nostalgia–and who hands back each of these when it's needed?

What is a parent but someone you trust to keep you safe, and to tell you the truth?

I am pacing the small cubicle when my father is brought in to see me. I can't look him in the eye, so I focus instead on the cut on his face, a fishhook that curves down the side of his cheek. I pick up the phone to talk to him. “Who hurt you?” I ask, swallowing.

“It'll be all right.” He touches his face gingerly. “I didn't think you'd be coming back so soon.”

“I didn't think I would, either,” I say. “I'm sorry I missed your arraignment.” My father shrugs. “Plenty more where that came from,” he says. “Is it true, what Eric said? That you wanted me to plead not guilty?”

“I love you,” I say, my eyes filling with tears. “I want you to do whatever it takes to get out of there.”

He leans closer to the glass between us. “That's exactly why I had to run away with you, Dee.”

“See, I could almost believe that. Except, I went to see my mother today.” I watch his face go white. “How is she?”

“Well, she's practically a stranger,” I say.

He splays his hand on the glass. “Delia–”

“Don't you mean Bethany?”

Shock squeezes through the telephone connection between us, a static silence.

“Did you really have that bad a life?” my father asks tightly.

“I don't know. I have no idea what it would have been like if I'd been brought up by my mother.” When he doesn't answer, I keep talking. “Did you know she saved my baby blanket? The one with all the patches? The one that I wanted to go back for the day we left, but you wouldn't let me? Did you know that she still celebrates my real birthday? I didn't even do that, growing up.”

My father sinks down heavily onto the stool in the booth.

“Maybe you can tell me what I'm missing,” I say, my voice too high and thin.

“Because the woman I spoke to was just as sorry as I was for having missed twenty-eight years.”

“I'll bet she's sorry,” my father says, so quietly that I think I've misheard him.

“What did she do to you?” I whisper. “What did she do that made you so angry you had to get revenge by kidnapping me?”

“It wasn't what she did to me,” my father answers. “It's what she did to you.” A vein starts to throb in his temple. “We did go back for your blanket,” he says. “We walked into the house, and you tripped over your mother, who was lying on the floor, passed out cold. And I can tell you exactly what your life would have been like, if she was the one who brought you up. You would have had to make yourself breakfast before kindergarten, because your mother was too hung over to do it for you. You would have had to check the toilet tank, to throw out the vodka bottle that was hidden inside. You would have wondered why she couldn't love you enough to want to stop. Your mother was a drunk, Delia. She couldn't take care of herself, much less a baby. That's the wonderful upbringing I took you away from. That's the truth I lied about. That's what I wanted you to miss.”

I stumble backward, the telephone line stretching like an umbilicus. I have learned this lesson over and over doing search-and-rescue work: If you choose to go looking for something, you'd better be ready for whatever it is you find. Because it may not be what you've been expecting.

“I gave you the mother you didn't get,” my father pleads. “If I'd told you the truth–if I told you what she was really like–wouldn't that have been worse than the way you lost her the first time?”

For nearly a year after I was told about my mother's death, I would run to the door every time the doorbell rang. I was certain that my father had gotten it wrong. That any moment my mother was going to show up so that we could live happily ever after.

But she hadn't. Not because she was dead, as my father had told me, but because she had never existed.

I let the telephone receiver drop from my hand and turn around, away from the Plexiglas. I don't look back at my father, not even when he starts screaming both of my names and a guard comes to take him away.

I have never been a very good drunk. Even when I was a student at UNH, a few beers would make me sick and hard liquor only made me hyperaware, prone to wondering why the tables had been stained the color of hazelnuts and whether anyone ever bothered to clean the flies out of the ceiling fan in the ladies' bathroom. I didn't know for a long time that Eric was an alcoholic. When Eric drank, he became only more engaging and funny and amusing. He did it so seamlessly, in fact, that it took me several years to understand that the reason Eric always seemed to be the same person, whether he had a beer in his hand or not, was not because he didn't get drunk, but because he was hardly ever sober. The life of the party who can build geometric carbon models out of toothpicks and maraschino cherries and get a whole bar full of Japanese tourists to join in singing

“Yellow Submarine” becomes less charming when that same person forgets he is supposed to pick you up after work and lies about where he has been all night, and cannot hold a conversation in the morning unless he's had some hair of the dog that bit him. I've hesitated this long to accept his marriage proposal because I didn't want my child to grow up with a parent who is unreliable and selfish. So how can I blame my own father for feeling the same way?

When I pull into my mother's driveway again, I am so upset that I am shaking. My mother comes to the door mixing something in a mortar and pestle; it smells like rosemary. Her face lights up when she sees me. “Come on in.”

“Is it true?”

“Is what true?”

“That you're an alcoholic?”

The smile dries on my mother's face, paint peeling. She glances around the street to see who might have heard, and ushers me inside. There is a part of me dying to be told that this, like so many other things, is just another fabrication of my father's. This is another step in his scheme to make me hate my mother, too. But she pushes her hair back from her face, tucks it behind her ears. “Yes,” she says bravely. “I am.” She folds her arms across her chest. “And I haven't had a drink in twenty-six years.”

An honest confession can slice the hardest heart in two. “Why didn't you tell me?”

“You didn't ask,” my mother says quietly.

But it is a lie, even if you don't say it. It is a lie when you force a connection, because you so desperately want there to be one. It is a lie when you tell yourself that you will have lunches together and pass down secret recipes and do all the hundred other things that I have fantasized daughters do with their mothers, as if that might actually make us any less foreign to each other. No one gets to start where they left off; it just doesn't work that way.

She reaches for me, and when I back away, her eyes fill with tears. “You came here, and you were so happy to see me,” she says. “I thought if I told you, I'd lose you all over again.”

“You let me think you were a victim,” I accuse.

“I was,” my mother says. “I may not have been a perfect mother, but I was your mother, Beth. And I loved you.”

Past tense.

“That isn't my name,” I say tightly, and this time, it is my decision to leave. Greta and I were once called during a blizzard to find a teenage girl who had left a suicide note and disappeared, leaving her single father in an absolute state of panic. It was down in Meredith, the Lakes Region. The local police had begun to search on a footprint trail, but the snow was falling so fast that her tracks vanished almost the moment they were located.

Locals had been warned off the roads that night; the only vehicles I passed on my way there were plows and sanding trucks. When I arrived, I was taken to the girl's father. He was rocking back and forth in an armchair, fist pressed to his mouth, as if he were afraid of the grief that might spill out. “Mr. Damato,” I asked, “does Maria have a special place? A spot she goes to when she wants to be alone?” He shook his head. “Nowhere I know.”

“Can you show me her room?”

He led me to the back of the house. The girl's room was typical–twin bed, milk-crate bookshelves, laptop, lava lamp. But unlike most teenagers' bedrooms, this one was spotless. The bed had been made, the papers cleared from the top of the desk. The clothes were all neatly hanging in the closet. The trash can had been dumped.

Vanishing Acts

Because Maria Damato had already done her wash, too, I scented Greta off a pair of shoes I found in her closet. Outside, the snow whistled and spun around us. Greta started out west, toward the road, and then veered into the woods. At points she had to leap snowdrifts; at other times I fell on my hands and knees in them. Every time I opened my mouth, I tasted ice.

Two hours later Greta broke through the trees and began to tiptoe across the frozen flat of the lake. With all this snow, it did not look like a body of water, but instead a wide-open field. Snowflakes the size of quarters clotted on my lashes and lips, and gave Greta Groucho Marx eyebrows. The powder made the ice even more hazardous; we both went sprawling a few times. But finally Greta stopped and put her front paws on a mound that didn't sink. She turned a small circle; did it again. I saw the girl's hair first, frozen into jagged spikes. I rolled her over and immediately began to do artificial respiration, but she came up scratching like a cat.

“Get off me, get off me!” she shrieked, and then she opened her eyes and started to sob.

The EMT workers who met us at the lake said that the snow had acted as an insulator, keeping Maria alive longer than she might have been otherwise. Her father, who had been called with the good news, was waiting at the front door when we returned. Holding my arm for support, Maria took a tentative step toward her father. Suddenly, Greta stepped between them and growled low in her throat.

“Greta,” I said, calling the dog off. But in that instant, I'd felt Maria relax. As if she'd been vindicated.

Believe me, I have seen it all: from delicate boys with the faces of sprites who run from the teasing of bullies; to teens who climb to the top of water towers, intent on dying closer to Heaven; to the willow-thin girls who hide in the night from their mother's boy friends. My job, though, is to bring them home, not to judge the motives that made them run away. So that night, I returned Maria Damato to the custody of her grateful parent. I did what I was expected to do. A month later the detective on the case called to tell me that Maria had shot her father and then killed herself. I gave Greta an extra serving of Dog Chow that day, for understanding more than any human had. It just goes to show you: Sometimes knowing what's right isn't a rational decision, or even what works on paper. Sometimes leaving is the best course of action after all.

When Sophie was two, Eric and I took her fishing. It was a lazy Sunday, and we were sitting on a dock on Goose Pond. Eric would thread a worm onto the hook and cast, then cup his hands around Sophie's on the fishing rod. She had just learned the word fish, and when we pulled a trout or a bass out of the water, she'd clap her hands and say it over and over.

To this day, I'm not sure how it happened. Eric had let go of Sophie to bait the hook, and I was pointing to the rainbow scales of the trout that we'd just released back into the cool, dark water. There was the tiniest splash, like a rock being skipped across the surface of the pond, and we both looked up to see that Sophie was gone.

She wasn't wearing a life jacket–she fought us like crazy when we tried to zip it up, and we'd rationalized with ourselves: With both of us watching her, what could go wrong? “Sophie?” Eric yelled, the ragged edge of panic serrating her name. I didn't think, just jumped into the water fully clothed and opened my eyes. It was cloudy and my shoes kicked up sand from the bottom, but there was a flash of something bright, and I lunged for it.

Sophie, who didn't know how to swim, had sunk like a stone, and was drifting underneath the dock. I grabbed her by her shirt, yanked her over my head, handed her to Eric. He laid her out on the rough weathered boards while she sputtered and choked and I hauled myself out of the pond.

She was too frightened to cry, and although it felt like a lifetime, the whole episode had lasted less than two minutes. The bright spot I'd seen under the water was a necklace my father had given her for her birthday–a silver star, to wish on. Sophie likes to hear the story of how we saved her life. She can repeat all the details, but they are trappings of a story we've seasoned to perfection over the years. She has no recollection of the incident firsthand, and Eric and I are both grateful for that. There are some things, I think, you're better off not remembering. The back of the trailer park wedges wide into a dry, dusty vista, which is where Eric takes me to see the sunset: a fuchsia curtain being drawn down through the pleats of the mountains.

He's still dressed in a suit, but he's loosened his tie. We watch the sky turn every watercolor shade of orange and purple, a painting too lovely to be real, while a few feet away, Sophie throws a tennis ball for Greta to chase. “I've been thinking that if law doesn't pan out for me, I'm going to audition as a Phoenix weatherman. Look, I've got it down: Monday, 104 and sunny. Tuesday, 104 and sunny. Wednesday, a cool 102 and–”

“Eric,” I say. “Stop.”

He does, immediately. “I was only trying to cheer you up, Dee. Fitz tells me you had a hell of a day.”

“You shouldn't have let me miss the arraignment,” I reply.

“It wasn't my fault. They never even told me it was scheduled.” He slides an arm around my waist. “Tell me about your mother.”

I watch a hawk spiral overhead, his talons ripping the fabric of the sky to show a star or two. The sunset reaches its death throes, an explosion of ginger and pink and night. “She's an alcoholic,” I say finally.

I can tell by the way he goes perfectly still that this is news for him. “Back then, too?” he asks.

“Yeah.” I face him. “Do you think that's why I fell in love with you?”

“God, I hope not,” Eric laughs.

“I'm serious. What if there was a part of me that couldn't fix her, so I had to fix you?”

Eric reaches for my shoulders. “You couldn't even remember her, Dee.” There is no denying this. But was it because I couldn't, or because I didn't want to? Memory isn't something that stays with you at all times. It's a quantity that gets summoned or evoked or brought to mind. It gets carried to an arena for our viewing pleasure. By definition, then, there are times it must go missing. Or does it? When I used to complain about Eric's drinking, he told me I was being unreasonable. One beer, and I couldn't stand the smell on his breath. Now I wonder if this was some scent recollection, some unconscious understanding that a person who smelled of alcohol was bound to disappoint me.

“I went to the jail today, too,” I say.

“How'd that go?”

“On a scale of one to ten?” I look up at him. “Minus four.”

“Well, maybe this day wasn't an entire wash. You might have found me an affirmative defense.”

“What do you mean?”

“If your father had a valid reason to take you–like that your mothers drinking put you at risk–and he tried to get legal recourse but couldn't, it might get him off the hook.”

“Do you think it'll work?”

“It's better than the defense I was planning on running,” Eric says.

“Which was?”

“You were actually abducted by Miss Scarlet, in the library, with the wrench.” I shake my head, but he's managed to make me smile. When I think about my father, an ache rises like dough under my breastbone. I have not been fair to him; if anything, I'm guilty of the same offense: trying to keep the life we had from being ruined. Is it a crime when you love someone so much that you can't stand the thought of them changing? Is it a crime when you love someone so much that you can't see clearly?

Beside me, Eric throws Greta's tennis ball far over the scrub of the land. In the coming dark, his features are blurred. He could be anyone, and so could I. Elise

You probably don't remember this, but I once told you the story of the minute my mother died. I was sixteen, and miles away at the time–she was visiting her sister in Texas–but I woke up with a start at midnight to find her sitting on the edge of my bed with her hand touching my face. “Mami?” I whispered, and she disappeared, leaving behind a scent of tuberose so strong that in all the years since, I have never been able to scrub it from my own skin.

The next morning my aunt called to tearfully tell me about the car accident, which happened at the exact moment I had awakened the night before. When I told her about my mother's visit, it was no surprise to either of us. Ask any faithful Mexican and they will tell you what the brujas know: The dead come back to collect their footsteps.

Over the years, sometimes, I thought I could feel you standing behind me. I was certain that I could feel the paintbrush tickle of your hand on the canvas of my palm. I would start to run the water in the bathtub and hear you laughing from the other side of the door.

Each of these times I pretended it hadn't happened. I'd close my eyes more tightly or increase the flow of the faucet or turn up the radio. I didn't let myself admit that the only way I might see you, again, was in that last moment when you would be back to gather your footsteps like an armful of brilliant desert flowers, a consolation prize you would present to me in return for losing you forever. On December 9, 1531, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to an Indian named Juan Diego. A carpet of roses blossoming in the dead of winter and a Madonna with a coffee-colored face appearing on Juan Diego's robe were enough further evidence to convince the local bishop to erect a shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe. There are those who say Guadalupe is Tonantzin, an Aztec goddess who existed years before Juan Diego came along. The Spanish missionaries, knowing that she had quite a local following, baptized her into Christianity as Our Lady of Guadalupe. What they didn't realize was that Tonantzin was a goddess who could take away sins through secret rituals performed by her priestesses–the brujería.The missionaries, basically, made it perfectly fine for Catholic Indians to go to Mass, but also visit a witch.

My mother was a bruja, and I grew up watching her clients come for all sorts of spells–to guarantee healthy babies, to bless a new house, to keep a son from joining the armed forces. When she lit a red candle to Guadalupe and recited an Ave, Doña Tarano's liver tumor miraculously shrank. When she prayed to Saint Catalina de Alejandria, a family on the brink of debt came into a windfall. Of course, brujas are also specialists in justice when someone's wronged you. A curse from a bruja might punish a cheating husband, or unleash a rash on someone spreading gossip. People at the receiving end of a bruja's curse understand that they have done something to deserve it; a hex only works on the guilty. My mother taught me how to lay an altar and choose a cuchillo; how to learn what a reading of los naipes might say about my life, but when I was younger, I cast spells only for myself. I never expected to be a bruja here in Phoenix, but word travels fast among the Mexican community, and people have need of a good witch every now and then. I found, too, that when I was working magic, I had to focus so hard that for those few minutes I stopped blaming myself for losing you. The day after you came to see me–one wonderful visit, then one awful one–I am having trouble concentrating on the client who is with me in my santuario. “Dona Vasquez,” Josephina asks, “did you hear what I just said?” This is what I wish I'd told you yesterday: I'm not the person I was then, any more than you are. I have waited twenty-eight years to see you; I can wait a little while longer.

Please come back.

“The spell isn't working,” Josephina sighs.

I have been trying to silence her roommate, a college girl from ASU who spread so many lies about Josephina sleeping around that her boyfriend broke up with her. I suggested a case of la lengua ardiente–the burning tongue–to teach the roommate a lesson. “Did you use the candle?”

I had given Josephina one the last time she visited, black wax molded in the shape of a woman. “Yeah. I scratched her initials on the face, just like you told me, and I got that Ass-Kickin' Hot Sauce from Uncle Tio's Taco Palace, dipped the needle in it, and shoved it into the candle's mouth.”

“You lit it?”

Josephina nods. “And I pictured her stupid horse face, like you said, and then blew the candle out. But she didn't come by the next day to say that she was sorry. And if that's not bad enough . . .” She lowers her voice. “Then I found a cobweb in the corner of my apartment, right after I cleaned.”

Well, that changes everything. Finding a spider web in an otherwise spotless space is a sure sign that someone is trying to hex you. “Josephina, I think your roommate may just be a diablera.”

Just as there are good witches–brujeria–there are evil witches. Their hexes, unfortunately, can land squarely on the shoulders of those who've done nothing to deserve them.

“Renee isn't even Mexican,” Josephina says. “She's from New Jersey.”

“If she's a diablera, she may just be telling you that to keep you off guard.” Josephina looks doubtful. “But. .. she has big hair.” I start to get up. “If you don't want my help .. .”

“No! I do. Really.”

“All right. Take a tablespoon of graveyard dirt and a tablespoon of olive oil and mix the ingredients with the index finger of your left hand. Sprinkle this with black pepper.Then spread it on the picture of Renee in your college freshman face book and bury it in a cemetery.”