Vanishing Acts (18 page)

The other card was the Ace of Wands, which any novice bruja will tell you stands for chaos.

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You have my hair, and my smile. You also have my stubbornness. It's a little like having your past self come calling, and wishing you could warn yourself about what will happen.

You told me what you remembered about your childhood, but you didn't ask me what I remember. If you had, I would have said everything–from the moment you arrived in this world and curled stiff as a snail against the overwashed cotton of my hospital gown, to the licorice twist of your braids beneath my fingers, to the way I went to kiss you before you left with Charlie for your weekend visitation, so sloppy and sure of myself that when I missed your cheek and landed on air stupidly assumed I would have a thousand more chances to get it right. After you vanished, I went to Mexico to visit a bruja with whom my mother had studied. She lived in a cottage with three blue iguanas who had the run of the house, and who were rumored to be former men who had treated her badly. I went on June 13, the feast of San Antonio de Padua. Her waiting room was packed with the needy, who shared their sad stories to pass the time: a woman who had left her grandmother's diamond ring in a public restroom; an elderly man who had misplaced the deed to his house; a child clutching a Perro Perdido flyer with a photo of a hot-eyed hound; a priest whose faith had gone off course. I waited silently, watching the red roosters peck at kernels of corn in her front yard. When it was my turn, I went into the santuario and handed the bruja the requisite small statue of San Antonio, along with my written description of what I had lost. She whispered a prayer and wrapped the statue in the paper. She tied it with red string. “A hundred pesos,” she said. I paid her, and then drove north, pulling over at the first body of water I could find. I threw the package as far as I could into the reservoir, and waited until I thought it might have sunk to the bottom. San Antonio is the patron saint of things that have gone missing. Make an offering on his feast day, and what's lost will be back in your possession within a year. Unless, that is, it has been destroyed.

I went to that Mexican bruja every June until she died, and asked for the same spell each time. Year after year, when you were not returned to me, I never blamed her or San Antonio. I thought it was my fault; something I had left out or gotten wrong in the written description of you, which grew longer every year–from paragraph to epic poem to masterpiece. I would spend the following three hundred and sixty-four days crafting the note I would bring to the bruja the next time around, if you still hadn't turned up.

Although that bruja is long dead, I think I finally know what I should have written. Twenty-eight years is a long time to think about why I loved you, and it's not for the reasons I first assumed: because you swam in the space below my heart; or because you stanched the youth I was bleeding out daily; or because one day you might take care of me when I couldn't take care of myself. Love is not an equation, as your father once wanted me to believe. It's not a contract, and it's not a happy ending. It is the slate under the chalk and the ground buildings rise from and the oxygen in the air. It is the place I come back to, no matter where I've been headed. I loved you, Bethany, because you were the one relationship I never had to earn. You arrived in this world loving me more, even when I did not deserve it. IV

Sometimes it is necessary

To reteach a thing its loveliness.

–Galway Kinnell, “St. Francis and the Sow”

Eric

When I was thirteen years old I met the perfect girl. She was nearly as tall as I was, with cornsilk hair and eyes the color of thunderstorms. Her name was Sondra. She smelled like lazy summer Sundays–mowed grass and sprinklers–and I found myself edging closer to her whenever I could, just to breathe in deeply. I imagined things in Sondra's company that I'd never bothered to imagine before: what it would feel like to walk barefoot on a volcano; how to find the patience to count all the stars; whether it physically hurt to grow old. I wondered about kissing: which way to turn my head, if her lips would save the impression of mine, the way my pillow always knew how to come back to the curve of my head night after night. I didn't talk to her, because this was all so much bigger than words. I was walking beside Sondra when she suddenly turned into a rabbit and hopped away, disappearing underneath the hedge in the front of my house. The next morning when I woke up from my dream, it didn't matter that this girl had never existed, that I had been unconscious when I had conjured her. I found myself crying when I took the milk out of the refrigerator for my cereal; it was all I could do to get from one minute to the next. I spent hours sitting on the lawn, trying to find a rabbit in our shrubbery.

Sometimes we don't know we're dreaming; we can't even fathom that we're asleep.

I still think of her, every now and then.

Our first week in Arizona passes slowly. I immerse myself in state case law; I wade through the prosecution's discovery. The environment seems to stir something up in Delia, who starts remembering more and more about her childhood–snippets that usually make her cry. She summons the courage to go visit her father a couple more times; she takes long walks with Sophie and Greta. One morning I wake up to find Ruthann's trailer on fire. Smoke rolls over the roof in a thick gray cloud as I burst through the front door, yelling for my daughter, who spends more time over there than she does with us these days. But there are no flames inside, not even any smoke. And Sophie and Ruthann are nowhere to be found.

I run around to the yard behind the trailer. Ruthann sits on a stump; Sophie's at her feet. The plume of gray smoke I saw in the front of the house comes from a small campfire. Set in its center are two cinder blocks with a thin, flat stone balanced on top. A bead of water on the hot stone spits and dances. Ruthann does not look up at me, but takes a bowl filled with blue batter and ladies a spoonful onto the stone. She uses the flat of her hand to spread the batter as thin as it will go, pressing her palm down on the searing surface.

As the batter solidifies into a circle, Ruthann takes an onion-skin-thin tortilla from a plate beside her and settles it on top of the one still cooking on the stone. She folds in the sides and then rolls from the bottom up, making a hollow tube that she passes over to me. “An Egg McMuffin it's not,” she says. It looks, and tastes, like pale blue tracing paper. It sticks to the roof of my mouth.

“What's in it?”

“Blue corn, rabbit-ear sage, water. Oh, and ashes,” Ruthann adds. “Piki is an acquired taste.”

But my daughter–the one who will eat macaroni and cheese only if the noodles are straight, not curly, who insists that I cut the crusts off her peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and slice on the diagonal, instead of the half–is stuffing this piki in her mouth as if it's candy.

“Siwa helped me grind the cornmeal yesterday,” Ruthann says.

“Siwa means Sophie,” Sophie adds.

“It means youngest sister,” Ruthann corrects, “but that's still you.” She spreads another circle of batter on the burning stone with her bare hand, lets it set, and flips it over in a seamless motion.

“Finish telling me the story, Ruthann.” Sophie looks over her shoulder at me. “You interrupted.”

“Sorry.”

“It's about a rabbit who got too hot.”

Sondra, I think.

Ruthann folds up another piece of piki and rolls it in a paper towel, handing it to Sophie. “Where did I leave off?”

“In the Great Heat,” Sophie says, settling down cross-legged in front of Ruthann.

“The animals were all droopy.”

“Yes, and Sikyatavo, Rabbit, was worst of all. His fur was matted with red dirt from the desert. His eyes were so dry they burned. He wanted to teach the sun a lesson.”

She folds another cone of piki. "So Rabbit ran off to the edge of the world where every morning, Sun came up. He practiced with his bow and arrow the whole way. But when he got there, Sun had left the sky. Rabbit thought that was cowardly, but he decided to wait for Sun to return the next day. Sun, though, had seen Rabbit practicing and decided to have a little fun with him. Back in those days, you see, Sun didn't come up slowly like he does now. He'd burst into the sky with one leap. So the next day, Sun rolled far away from where he usually jumped into the sky and then leaped up. By the time Rabbit got his bow and arrow together, Sun was already so high he couldn't be touched. Rabbit stamped his foot and shouted, but Sun only laughed.

“One morning,” Ruthann continues, “Sun got careless. He jumped more slowly than usual, and Rabbit's arrow plunged into his side. Rabbit was delighted! He'd shot the Sun! But when he looked up again he saw how flames bled from the wound. Suddenly the whole world seemed to be on fire.”

She stands up. “Rabbit ran to a cottonwood, and a greasewood tree, but neither one would hide him–they were too afraid of being burned to a crisp. Suddenly he heard a voice calling to him: 'Sikyatavo! Under me! Hurry!' It was a small green bush with flowers like cotton. Rabbit ducked beneath it, just as the flames leaped over the bush. Everything crackled and hissed, and then went quiet.” Ruthann looks at Sophie. “The earth all around was black and burnt, but the fire was gone. And the little bush that had saved Rabbit wasn't green anymore, but a deep yellow. Even today, that kind of bush grows green, and then turns yellow when it feels the sun.”

“What happened to Rabbit?” Sophie asks.

“He was never the same. He has brown spots on his fur, from where the fire burned him. And he's not so tough anymore, you know. He runs away and hides, instead of putting up a fight. Sun isn't the same, either,” Ruthann says. “He makes himself so bright that no one can look at him long enough to shoot straight.” Ruthann cracks her knuckles; silver and turquoise rings wink like fireflies. “Let's clean up,” she says to Sophie, “and then if your dad says it's okay, you can come with me to the garage sale around the corner and scope out inventory.” Sophie runs into the house, leaving me alone with Ruthann. “You don't have to keep her with you.”

“It's good to have a child to tell a story to.”

“Do you have any of your own?”

The lines of Ruth's face carve deeper. “I had a daughter once.” Maybe we can all be divided along this rift: Those who have been lucky enough to keep our children, and those who have had them taken away from us. Before can find the appropriate response, Sophie comes out of the house, dragging a bucket of sand behind her. She pours it onto the fire, banking the embers, a small cloud of soot sighing up around her knees.

“Soph,” I say, “if you can be a good girl, you can stay with Ruthann a little longer.”

“Of course she can be good,” Ruthann says. “Where I come from, on Second Mesa, our grandmothers give us our names, and our grandfathers give us our manners. The ones who aren't good don't have grandfathers to tell them how to behave. And you have a grandfather, don't you, Siwa?” She hands Sophie the bowl of leftover batter. “Kitchen sink,” she instructs. The sun has risen high enough to gnaw on the back of my neck. I think of Rabbit, and his arrow. “Thanks, Ruthann.”

She gives me a half smile. “Watch your aim, Sikyatavo,” she warns, and she follows Sophie inside.

In 1977, in Arizona, a man could squirrel his daughter away to another part of the country and it was considered kidnapping. By 1978 the laws had changed, and that same man, for the same act, would be charged with custodial interference-a lesser felony. “Jesus, Andrew,” I murmur, poring over the books in my borrowed conference room at Hamilton, Hamilton. “Couldn't you have waited a few months?” Frustrated, I pick up one of the law books and whip it across the room, narrowly missing Chris as he walks in.

“What's the matter with you?” he asks.

“My client is an idiot.”

“Of course he is. If he wasn't, he wouldn't need a lawyer.” Chris sits down and leans back in the chair across from me. “Boy, did you miss out last night, bud. Picture a natural redhead named Lotus, following me into the men's room at The Frantic Gecko to demonstrate how flexible a yoga instructor can actually be. And she had a friend who could lift her wineglass with her foot.” He smiles. “I know, I know. You're practically married. But still. You got any Tylenol?” I shake my head.

“Then I definitely need coffee. You take cream or sugar?”

“I don't drink–”

“Coming right up,” he says, and he leaves.

I break out in a sweat, imagining already what it will be like to have a cup sitting on the table a few inches from me, steaming and fragrant. What most people don't understand is the interstitial space between lifting that mug and emptying its contents in the sink. In that instant, which is only as long as a thought, need can grow to such enormous proportions that it muscles reason out of the way, and before you know it, I am lifting the drink to my mouth.

To drive my mind away from this, I start to flip through the pages of Arizona statutes to see if there's an affirmative defense for kidnapping, and finally find the paragraph I am looking for.

S13-417. Necessity defense. Conduct that would otherwise constitute an offense is justified if a reasonable person was compelled to engage in the proscribed conduct and the person had no reasonable alternative to avoid imminent public or private injury greater than the Injury that might reasonably result from the person's own conduct.