Vanishing Acts (40 page)

And, oh, God, the taste of it. The sooty smoke in the back of the throat; the burn on the flesh of my lips. The stream of it through the baleen of my teeth. After a day like this one, anyone would need to unwind a little.

Tonight, the moon is jaundiced and scarred. It's so close to the roof of Ruthann's trailer that for a moment I imagine that the corner of the roof might prick it, send it flying like a pierced balloon.

Why do they call it a mobile home, if it never goes anywhere?

“Eric?” A sliver of light splinters my arm, then my leg, then half of my body as Delia opens the door. “Are you still out here?”

I manage to slide the whiskey bottle behind my calf where she can't see it. She sits down on the step behind me. “I just wanted to say that I'm sorry. I know this isn't your fault.”

If I answer, she'll smell the booze on my breath. So instead, I just hang my head, and hope she thinks I'm overwhelmed.

“Come inside,” she says, reaching for my hand, and I'm so grateful for this that when I stand up I forget what I've been hiding, and the bottle rolls down the steps.

“Did you drop something?” Delia asks, but as her eyes adjust to the darkness, she sees the label. “Oh, Eric,” she murmurs, a boatload of disillusion in those broken syllables.

By the time I shake myself out of my stupor enough to follow her inside, she's already hauled a sleeping Sophie into her arms. She whistles for Greta, and grabs her car keys from the counter.

“For God's sake, Delia, it was just a little nightcap. I'm not drunk, look at me. Listen to me. I can stop whenever I feel like it.”

She turns around, our daughter caught between us. “So can I, Eric,” she says, and she walks out the front door.

I don't call her back when she gets into the Explorer. The taillights dance down the road, the sideways eyes of a demon. I sit down on the bottom step of the trailer and pick up the bottle of whiskey, which is lying on its side. It's half full.

Fitz

It takes a while to get Sophie settled in my motel room, with Greta curled on the edge of the bed like a sentry. Then, using the tiny immersion heater that shares a plug with the hair dryer in the bathroom, I boil water for tea. I bring a cup of it out to Delia, who is sitting outside the motel room on one of the plastic lawn chairs that overlook the parking lot.

“Let's see,” she says. “In less than twelve hours' time, I found out that I was abused as a child and that my fiance's fallen off the wagon. I figure I'm due to come down with cancer any minute, don't you think?”

“God forbid,” I tell her.

“Brain tumor.”

“Shut up.” I sit down beside her.

“All those things he was saying in the courtroom,” she says. “Didn't Eric even listen to himself?”

“I don't know if he wanted to,” I admit. “I think he would have rather believed he was who you wanted him to be.”

“Are you saying this is my fault?”

“No. Not any more than the other is your father's.” Her mouth snaps shut, and she takes a sip of her tea. “I hate it when you're right,” she says. And then, more softly: “How can you be a survivor, when you can't even remember the war?”

I take the cup out of her hand and spread her palm flat on top of mine, then turn it, over as if I am about to read her future. I trace the life line and the love line; I trail my fingers over the cords of her wrist. “None of it changes anything,” I tell her. “No matter what your father said up there. You're the same person you were before he said it.”

She pushes me away. “What if you found out that you used to be a girl, Fitz? And that you had operations and everything and you don't remember a single bit of it?”

“That's just crazy,” I reply, my masculine pride kicking in. “There'd be scars.”

“Well, don't you think I have those, too? What else do you think I've forgotten?”

“Alien abduction?” I joke.

“No, just a plain human one,” she says bitterly.

“Would you like my childhood memories, instead? How about the one where my father leaves my mother for a month when he can't stop gambling in Vegas? Or the one where she holds a kitchen knife up to him and tells him he will never, ever, bring his whore to her house again. Or maybe you'd like the one where she swallows all her Valium, and I get to call nine-one-one.” I stare at her.

“Remembering misery is not all it's cracked up to be.” Chagrined, she looks into her lap. “It's hard to know what to trust, that's all.” Her words make me run cold. “Delia, I need to tell you something.”

“You used to be a girl before the operation?”

“I'm being serious,” I say. “I knew that Eric was drinking again.” She draws back slowly. “What?”

“I was there two days ago, and I found a bottle.”

“Why didn't you tell me?” Delia says, stung.

“Why don't any of us tell you anything?” I respond. “We love you.” My statement startles a hawk out of the blanket of the night; it takes to the sky with a cry. Delia turns my words over in her mind, and then glances up at me. “How is my book coming?” she asks quietly.

“I haven't worked on it,” I say, though my throat has gone narrow as the eye of a needle. “I've been busy.”

“Maybe I could help you with it,” Delia suggests, and she kisses me again. She unspools in my arm, and although I understand she is trying to lose herself, I've been waiting too long for her to allow that to happen. I sink my fingers into her hair and unravel her ponytail; I tug at the buttons of the pajama top she arrived wearing. I sign my initials on the small of her back.

When she starts to unbuckle my belt, I grab her wrist. We can't go into the room where Sophie's sleeping, so I haul her into the backseat of her rental car, parked two feet in front of us. It seems ridiculous, adolescent, and in a way, perfectly fitting. Our knees knock against the windows and our feet get in the way, and because it is Delia, we even laugh. When we are both lying sideways on the seat and she reaches into my boxers, so that the ridge of my erection meets the silk of her palm, I actually stop breathing. “I'm a natural redhead,” I say, my voice shaking.

“That wasn't what I was checking.”

“Delia,” I ask, because even if she doesn't know herself all that well, I've made a life study of it, “are you sure you want to do this?”

“Are you sure you want me to think twice?” she answers, and then she lowers her mouth onto me.

There is a tremendous tide in me I didn't know I had; it pulls me by the blood to surge against her, to cry out when her fingernails rake the insides of my thighs. When I twist so that I'm braced above her, I wait for her to open her eyes, to know that this is me. I slide into the violet heat of her. I pick the rhythm between our pulses. We move as if we've been together forever, which, when you think about it, we have.

Afterward, the moon rounds on the roof of the car like a lazy cat, and Delia dozes in my arms. I don't let myself fall asleep; I've dreamed this enough already. This is how my story starts; this is how hers will end, if I have anything to say about it. An hour or so later, she stirs, stretching against the length of me. “Fitz?” Delia asks. “Have we ever done that before?”

I glance down at her. “No.”

“I didn't think I'd forgotten,” she says, but she's smiling against the curve of my neck.

She falls asleep this time holding my hand, Eric's diamond ring cutting into my palm like the wounds of Passion from the Crucifixion. I would do that for her, I realize. Die. Be reborn.

Delia

When we were kids, Fitz was unbeatable at Scrabble. It would drive Eric crazy, because he wasn't used to being bested by Fitz in much of anything. But Fitz had an uncanny memory, and once he saw a word, he wouldn't forget it. “There is no such word as linn,” Eric would argue, but sure enough, Webster's defined it as a waterfall.

Personally, I thought it was sort of amazing that anyone twelve years old would know that a pyx is a container for the Host during communion. But Eric wasn't used to being second-best, so he commissioned me into teaching him the dictionary. We worked our way through the letters with the same incredible focus that Eric applied to anything, when he was inclined. I'd make up vocabulary tests for Eric, and quiz him when he ate dinner over at our house. “At the very least,” my father used to say, “you two are going to ace your SATs.” Three weeks after we'd taken on the English language, it rained on a Saturday.

“Hey,” Fitz suggested, like usual. “Bet I can whip you in Scrabble.” Eric looked at me. “Huh,” he said. “What makes you think that?”

“Um . . . the five hundred and seventy thousand other times I've kicked your ass?” Fitz knew. The moment Eric laid down the letters J-A-R-L and then casually mentioned that it was a term for a Scandinavian noble, Fitz's eyes lit up. Our board was full of words like larum and girn and ghat and revet. Finally, when the score was almost tied, Eric set out valgus. Fitz started to laugh. “I don't think so.” Triumphant, Eric passed him the dictionary. He waited until Fitz found the right page. “Turned abnormally outward. Twisted.”

Fitz shook his head. “You got me, but you still lose.” And he set the word fungible on a triple word score, pulling into the lead.

“What does it mean?” I asked.

“It's us,” Fitz said. “Look it up.”

I did. I liked the word; it sounded like something you could punch into position, like a soft pillow, or hold on the roof of your mouth. I expected it to mean inseparable, brilliant, loyal–any of a hundred adjectives I could apply to us as a trio. Fungible, I read. Interchangeable.

In the morning, while Sophie is still fast asleep, I shower in Fitz's motel bathroom. He comes in as I am brushing my hair. Without saying a word, he takes the comb out of my hand and tilts my head back. He works through the knots first, and then makes long, sweeping strokes from the crown of my head to the ends. Our eyes meet in the mirror but neither of us speaks; we are afraid that whatever words we pick won't be able to bear the weight of what's happened.

“Do you want me to come with you?” he asks.

I shake my head, still attached by a rope of a loose ponytail to his fist. “I need you to take care of Sophie.”

I have told him I need to talk to Eric; I just haven't told him I'm stopping somewhere else, first.

As I drive, I relive what it was like to sleep in Fitz's arms last night. As much as I would like to credit this, too, to a memory lapse, I know it isn't. I can't blame Eric's drinking, either.

What I did was a mistake, because I am engaged to Eric.

But what if that was the mistake?

I met Fitz and Eric at the same time. We have all been friends for years. But what if the way I remember my relationships evolving with the two of them is different from the way it actually was? What if the things I've chosen to recall got twisted, somehow, during the recreation?

What if last night wasn't wrong . . . but finally, remarkably, right?

“I swear to you,” my mother says urgently, “Victor never would have done any of that.”

We are sitting on her patio, under a mister meant to counteract the blistering heat. As the water sprays out of the tiny nozzle heads, it immediately evaporates. It makes me think of those first years of my life, the ones that disappeared before I ever had a chance to really see them.

“You know what?” I say wearily. “I really don't know who I'm supposed to believe anymore.”

“How about yourself?” She shakes her head. “Did you ever think that maybe the reason you can't remember any of ... that ... is because it never happened? I know I'm the last person you'd turn to for credibility, Delia, but your father ... he wasn't here. You used to follow Victor around in the backyard, helping him plant his gardens–you followed him like a puppy. You wouldn't have done that if he'd been hurting you, would you?” She sighs. “Maybe your father thought he saw something, even though he didn't. Maybe you said something one day that didn't make sense to him. But maybe he was just jealous, because there was another man spending time with you, and he was afraid you'd found a replacement.” I realize, suddenly, that everyone is a liar. Memories are like a still life painted by ten different student artists: some will be blue-based; others red; some will be as stark as Picasso and others as rich as Rembrandt; some will be foreshortened and others distant. Recollections are in the eye of the beholder; no two held up side by side will ever quite match.

In that moment, I want to be with Sophie. I want to take off our shoes and run through the red sand; I want to hang upside down from the monkey bars with her. I want to listen to the jokes she makes without punch lines; I want to feel her sidle closer to me when we come to a street crossing. I want to make new memories instead of search for old ones.

“I have to go home,” I say abruptly. My mother gets to her feet, but I say I will let myself out. She hesitates, unsure, and then leans forward to kiss me good-bye on the cheek. We don't quite connect.

I head through the side gate and walk along the crushed stone path toward my car. I have just unlocked the door when a truck drives up. Victor steps out, and we stare at each other, palpably uncomfortable. “Delia,” he says. “I didn't do what he said.”