Vanishing Acts (32 page)

I stop speaking, because I can't trust ordinary language anymore. Words, in spite of what you think, don't always stay fixed. Take “emancipation”: it might be reconfigured into a maniac night op or an inanimate cop or maintain, cope.

“Madison Street Jail” becomes rationalism jested or slanted majorities. “Delia Hopkins,” by another name, could be diaphone silk, akin polished, oedipal knish. And “Andrew Hopkins”? Shake it up a bit and you find dank ownership. Orphans winked. Kidnaper shown.

Only twenty-four hours into my residency on Level 2, I'm moved. Another inmate has requested a switch because he's been threatened by his cellie–a white boy named Hayseed. Hayseed specifically asked the DOs if he could cell with me instead, saying we are old friends.

We aren't friends. I don't even know him. My best guess is that he knows about the meth; maybe he thinks I have some on me. I enter the cell and take his measure: Hayseed is still a kid–all yellow hair and buck teeth. “I hope you don't mind, man, about the switch. That other guy, he reeked. I don't think he showered in, like, three months. And I knew you were stuck with the Human Hairball; so I figured you might not mind a change of scenery.”

Hayseed likes to talk. He segues from the merits of Kabuta tractors over John Deere, to the fact that Nebraska is where Spam is made, to the barrettes he stole from the girls he raped and hid in the rotten core of a Ponderosa pine tree. I spend a lot of time staring at the upper bunk. Hayseed: ash eyed, ye hades. I count the number of coughs that ripple through the quiet after lights out. I do what it takes to stay awake, and think I've succeeded until the middle of the night, when I wake up to find that my nostrils and mouth are blocked, Hayseed's hand pressed tight against my flesh. I thrash out with my arms and legs; I try to reach for his wrists, but he is standing behind me and there are already stars at the corners of my vision.

“Wake up, Nigger-lover,” Hayseed whispers. “Your spook shouldn't have refused to sell to the Brotherhood. It was enough to make the boys upstairs give the green light for the hit.” His palm grinds down against my jaw, my teeth. “My brother said the nigger never even saw it coming.”

His brother killed Concise? What about Flaco?

“It was almost too easy, the way the spic volunteered to hide the gun after it was done. But Flaco didn't tell no one he was gonna say he'd made the hit, just so he could get his wet patch with the Mexican Mafia. You were supposed to go down for doing the deed.”

Hayseed leans close. “My brother also wants me to give you something,” he says, and he parts his fingers wide enough for me to gulp for air. He kisses me full on the mouth. Without missing a beat, he backhands me across the cheek, so hard that I start bleeding.

“I don't know your brother,” I choke out, terrified.

“Guess he never did get a chance to tell you where he got his nickname,” Hayseed says. “But then, a smart guy like you already knows that Nebraska's out in the Sticks.”

When Eric arrives the sun is just coming up. I still have cotton wadded into my broken nose, courtesy of the infirmary. One of my eyes has swelled shut. My throat is raw from the yelling I did to call the detention officers to the cell. Eric stands up when I open the door to the conference room. “I know I've been sort of... unreachable ... for the past couple of days. I've been going through a rough–holy shit, Andrew!” When he sees the condition of my face, he goes pale.

“They didn't tell me–”

“I can't stay here,” I say wildly. “You have to get me out.”

“Andrew, your trial starts in two–”

“I won't go back to that cell, Eric!”

He nods tightly. “All right. I won't leave here until they put you in administrative segregation.” The words are a balm; all I've needed to hear. I find myself sinking to my knees, bowing to the floor like a supplicant.

I do not think I've ever cried in front of Eric; I don't think I've ever cried in front of anyone until two days ago. You make yourself strong because it's expected of you. You become confident because someone beside you is unsure. You turn into the person others need you to be.

“Andrew,” Eric says, and I can hear how he is embarrassed for me. But I know how much lower there is for me to sink–that's the difference between us.

“I can't do this,” I say.

“I know. I'm going to talk to–”

“I mean in the long run, Eric. I can't go to prison.” I meet his gaze, my eyes still damp. “If I do, they'll kill me, too.”

Eric clasps my hand. “I swear to you,” he vows. “I'll get you acquitted.” Like anyone else who finds himself adrift at sea, I reach for this lifeline. I believe him, and just like that, I remember how to float.

Fitz

If it had been easy for Romeo to get Juliet, nobody would have cared. Same goes for Cyrano and Don Quixote and Gatsby and their respective paramours. What captures the imagination is watching men throw themselves at a brick wall over and over again, and wondering if this is the time that they won't be able to get back up. For everyone who adores a happy ending, there's someone else who cannot help but rubberneck at the accident on the side of the road.

You wonder, though, what would have happened if Juliet's best friend started flirting with Romeo. If Gatsby got drunk one night and told Daisy how he really felt. If any of those poor romantic fools would have driven hours north to the Hopi reservation and doubled back, the word sucker fizzing like acid in their bellies as they sneaked glances across the car at the woman they loved, knowing she was going home to another man.

You wonder if any of them would have been as stupid as I was, and kissed her.

“Listen,” I say. “It was an accident.”

One look and I can tell she isn't buying it.

“I promise it won't happen again.”

But Sophie narrows her eyes. “Liar.”

I have taken her out for ice cream, mainly because the thought of staying away from Delia, after yesterday, was both what I wanted more than anything and equally impossible: and mostly because once I arrived on her doorstep we were both so mortified that I grabbed the first excuse I could, Sophie, and ran.

“Liar?” I repeat. “Excuse me?”

“You kiss her all the time,” Sophie says. “You hug her, too. When you come back from trips.”

Well, maybe. But they are the sideways pecks and careful embraces of a friend; one that keeps three inches of space between our bodies, so that we meet at the shoulders and then grow progressively farther away.

“She smells good, doesn't she?” Sophie asks.

“She smells great,” I agree.

“It's okay to kiss people when you love them.”

“I don't love your mother,” I tell her. “Not like that, anyway.”

“You give her all your french fries, even when she won't give you back onion rings,” Sophie says. “And when you say her name it sounds different.”

“How?”

Sophie thinks. “Like it's covered with blankets.”

“I do not say your mother's name like it's covered in blankets. And I don't always give her my french fries, because you're right, she doesn't share.”

“But you still don't yell at her when she's not being fair,” Sophie points out.

“Because you don't want to hurt her feelings.” She slips her hand into mine and repeats, “You love her.”

She runs toward the playground without me. It has been so long since I was Sophie's age that I've forgotten there are building blocks of love, and that the very bottom layer is comfort. When I was little, who was I most myself with? Who could I trust with my mistakes, my dreams, my history? My parents, my nursery school teacher. Delia, Eric. These were the first people I fell for. Could it still really be that simple? Could romantic love and platonic love and parental love all be different facets of the same diamond–brilliant, no matter which face is turned up to the sun?

No, because I am not Sophie's age. No, because I know what it is to hear a woman sigh off the cloak of this world the moment she drifts asleep; no, because I have fallen into the meadow of her body. No, because puzzling through my sixth-grade math homework one day I realized that what Delia felt for Eric was not what Delia felt for me, and that this equation was not an equal sign, but a greater than.

I wonder if maybe Sophie knows me better than I know myself. I do hold the word Delia balanced lightly on my tongue, as if it is made up of butterflies. I would give her every last one of my french fries. I have kissed her, whenever the opportunity was socially acceptable. And even though it isn't fair, I haven't blamed her for not loving me. But here's where Sophie is wrong: It's not because I don't want to hurt Delia's feelings.

It's because when she is bruised, I'm the one who aches.

I'm dragging my proverbial feet, or at least the brake of the rental car, the whole way back to Delia's trailer. It is ridiculous to think I can avoid her forever. Maybe she'll want to pretend that kiss never happened. Maybe I can just apologize and we can go on making believe.

But when I pull up, her car is missing. Sophie gets out of the backseat and hurries up the steps to the trailer. I hesitate for a moment, but before I can make a clean getaway, Eric walks outside and holds up a hand in greeting. He looks like hell. His eyes are ringed with dark circles; his clothes appear to have been slept in. “Listen, Fitz,” he says, “about the other day. . .” I stand, poleaxed. Did Delia tell him?

He sighs. “It wasn't my place to tell Delia you were writing a newspaper story about her father's trial.”

By comparison, that transgression seems a thousand light-years away, and far less damning. “I'm sorry, too,” I say, speaking of a different mistake. I fumble with the latch of the car door.

“Do you forgive me for being a dick?”

“Already have.”

“Then why are you running out of here faster than Jesse Helms at a Gay Pride parade?”

“It isn't you,” I admit.

“Ah.” Eric walks toward the car. “Then it must have something to do with the way Delia ran out of here with Greta.”

“Faster than Jesse Helms?”

“Faster than Trent Lott at an Ebony magazine get-together.” Eric grins. “What are you two fighting about?”

You, I think. When you think about the way the three of us have woven our lives together, Eric is the knot at the center. I'm terrified to work it free; I just might discover I've unraveled everything else.

I can still see him looking down at me from the crest of the oak in his backyard, crowing because he'd made it to the top first. I can hear his voice over the matchstick strike of rain on the roof of our clubhouse, swearing that the homeless guy who lived in the culvert near the Wilder Dam turned into the Devil at night. I can feel the strength of him, clapping me on the back the first time we saw each other on break from college. I can see the way his eyes shine, when Delia's face is what's reflected back in them.

I would never ask Delia to choose between Eric and me, because I could never choose between the two of them.

“I'm just tired,” I say finally. “Headache.” Eric heads back to the trailer. “Come on in. I'll find you some aspirin.” Sighing, I follow him into the trailer. Sophie is in the bedroom, playing ventriloquist for a batch of Barbies and Kens. The small table in the kitchen is piled high with paperwork. “I don't know how I'm going to be ready in time for tomorrow morning,” Eric murmurs. “Some Wexton Farms seniors are flying in today, they're character witnesses. I'm supposed to pick them up at the airport.” He looks at me. “Rock, paper, scissors?”

With a sigh, I nod, and ball my hand into a fist. “Rock, paper, scissors, shoot,” we say simultaneously, and I throw paper while Eric throws scissors.

“You always throw scissors,” I complain.

“Then why the hell do you always throw paper?” He offers a grateful smile. “It's USAir, and it lands at three. And you're going to need six wheelchairs.”

“You owe me,” I say.

“Yeah, what's my tally up to ... seventy-five billion and six?”

“Give or take.” I walk around the table, trailing my hand over the paperwork. Words jump out at me: hostile witness, assailant, provocation. Two definitions are scrawled in marker across a legal pad: Lie: to deceive. Lie: to be in a helpless or defenseless state.

“Andrew's in pretty bad shape,” Eric confides.

I glance up. “So's Delia.”

“Yeah.” He meets my gaze. “Did she tell you why she left for the Hopi reservation in the first place?”

I draw in a breath. “It didn't come up.”

“She got angry, because I hadn't told her something her father told me in confidence. And the thing is, Fitz, it's just going to get worse during the trial. I'm going to have to do stuff and say things that she's not going to want to hear.”

“She'll forgive you, when it's all over,” I say woodenly.

“If Andrew's acquitted,” Eric qualifies. “I've spent my whole life thinking that one of these days, my luck is going to run out. That one of these days Delia is going to open her eyes and realize that I'm not the guy she thinks, but just some loser who can't get his act together. What if today's that day?”