Vanishing Acts (8 page)

I get out of the car and open Delia's door. She squares her shoulders and marches toward the entryway, a squat little addition with a heavy wooden door that makes me think of the ogre's cottage in a fairy tale. The correctional officer at the desk looks up from the MAXIM he's reading. “We've come to see an inmate,” I say.

“You a lawyer?”

“No, but–”

“Then come back Tuesday night during visiting hours.” He turns his attention back to his magazine.

“I don't think you understand–”

“Nope, I never do,” the CO answers dully.

“My father was brought in here two days ago–”

“Then you can't see him, period. It'll be a few weeks before he's approved for visitation.”

“My father won't be here in a few weeks,” Delia says. “He's being sent to Arizona.”

This, finally, gets his attention. There just aren't all that many people in the Grafton County Jail who are on the short list for extradition to another state.

“Hopkins?” the CO says. “You couldn't meet with him even if I let you. He left this morning for Phoenix.”

“What?” Delia says, stunned. “My father's not here? Does his lawyer know?” The CO turns as a door is slammed nearby, followed by the sound of Eric cursing. “He does now,” the guard answers.

Eric sees us standing in front of the CO's booth and does a double-take. “What are you doing here?”

“Why didn't you tell me my father was leaving today?”

“Because no one told me,” Eric says, shooting a dirty look at the CO who led him out. “Apparently, neither the Arizona prosecutor nor the Grafton County Jail thought it might be important to let me know that my client's been extradited.” He pulls out his wallet and digs through it. “You have any cash? I'm going to drive straight to the airport.”

I give him forty, Delia gives him fifty. “Do you even know where you're going?”

“I have a seven-hour trip to figure it out,” Eric says. He stamps a kiss on Delia's forehead. “Listen, I can handle this. In the meantime, find someone to watch the house for a while. Get tickets to Arizona for you and for Sophie. Bring a few of my suits and the box marked Andrew' that's sitting on the desk at my office. I'll call you on your cell as soon as I know more.”

The three of us walk outside, where it is still cold enough for the promises we are making to crystallize in the air. Eric heads to my car and tucks Delia into the passenger seat, leaning close to speak to her for a moment out of my range of hearing. I imagine him telling her that he loves her, that he will miss her, that when he closes his eyes on the plane her face will be what rises inside him–all the things I would be saying to her, in his place. After he closes the door, sealing her safely inside, he comes around the back of the car to talk to me. “I can't handle this,” he says.

“You just said–”

“Well, what the hell was I supposed to tell her? Fitz, I'm totally screwed. I honestly don't know what I'm doing,” Eric confesses. “I can count on one hand the number of felonies I've tried. I should have made her find another attorney. A real attorney.”

“You are a real attorney,” I say. “She wanted you because she knows you'll do everything to get Andrew out of this mess.”

He rubs a hand down his face. “Then what am I supposed to do when he gets convicted and Delia blames me?”

“Make sure you never have to find out.”

“I'm screwed,” Eric repeats, and shakes his head. “I have to go. Take care of her, okay?”

He gives Delia to me as if she were a jewel to be smuggled, a prayer to be whispered between heretics. A pawn. Eric is halfway across the parking lot by the time I answer. “I always do,” I say.

II

How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.

–Charles Baudelaire, La Fanfarlo

Delia

When I was little, I used to imagine the ways my mother would come back to me. I would be ordering a milkshake at a diner, and the woman sitting on the stool next to me would turn and our eyes would connect like lightning. Or I'd open the door and instead of the mailman, my mother would be standing there with her arms open. I'd go to my first driver s-ed class in high school and slip into the car and find her waiting with a clipboard in the passenger seat, just as surprised as I was. In all these daydreams, death was not the absolute it is supposed to be, and we always found each other by accident. In all of these daydreams, my mother and I recognized each other without a single spoken word.

It is strange to think that, sometime in the past twenty-eight years, she might have been standing in line behind me at the grocery store. We might have passed each other in a bus station or on a crowded street. We might even have talked politely on the phone, No I'm sorry, you have the wrong number. It is strange to think that we might have crossed paths, and still not have known what we were missing. You can boil your life down to a single suitcase, if you desperately have to. Ask yourself what you really need, and it won't be what you imagine–you will easily toss aside unfinished work, and bills, and your daily calendar to make room for the pair of flannel pajamas you wear when it rains; and the stone your child gave you that is shaped like a heart; and the battered paperback you revisit every April, because it was what you were reading the first time you fell in love. It turns out that what's important is not everything that you've accumulated all these years, but those few things you can carry with you.

Sophie presses her face to the tiny window of the plane, waiting for takeoff. It is her first flight. As far as my daughter knows, we are going on a spontaneous adventure. A vacation. I've told her that where we're headed, it's warm. That Eric is already there waiting for us.

Maybe ray mother is, too.

She still hasn't called. Maybe, like Fitz said, she's afraid; maybe her attorneys have told her not to. Eric has explained to me that just because the State of Arizona is prosecuting after all this time doesn't mean that my mother is pushing for it, or even that she's still alive. An outstanding warrant is an outstanding warrant, period. Every now and then I let myself think the darkest thought: that the reason she hasn't contacted me is because she doesn't want to. I cannot reconcile that mother with the one I've pictured for years.

But then again, if my mother was as perfect as I've always imagined, why would my father have run away with me? I've never doubted his love for me, but for that to still be true, given what I now know, do I have to doubt my mother's love for me?

And if I can't, if I won't, then don't I have to admit to myself that my father has done something wrong?

When I told all of this to Eric, he said I'd find out soon enough if my mother is still living in Arizona, that I should just stop analyzing it to death, because it's only going to make me crazy.

But if it were me, and Sophie, and it had been years ... I wouldn't listen to lawyers; I wouldn't pay attention to misgivings. I would walk halfway across the world to stand on my daughter's doorstep; I'd wait for her to answer the bell and hold her so close that nothing could come between us, not even the narrowest sliver of regret.

“Mommy?” Sophie asks. “Will they give Greta a seat belt?”

“She's in a special crate,” I assure her. “She's probably asleep by now.” Sophie considers this. “Does she ever dream?”

“Sure,” I reply. “You've seen her running in her sleep.”

“I had a dream last night,” Sophie tells me. “Grandpa was taking me for ice cream, but no matter what you asked for, you got strawberry.”

“He hates strawberry,” I say quietly.

“But in my dream,” Sophie says, “he ate it anyway.” She twists in her seat to face me. “Will Grandpa be on the other side?”

She means in Arizona, but that isn't how I hear it. I'd always thought of my father and me as a unit, a team, but now I'm not sure. On the one hand, I was his child, and he must have been doing what he felt he needed to do. On the other hand, I'm a mother now, and he committed my worst nightmare.

Sophie snuggles against me, twining her fingers in my hair. She used to sleep with it the way some babies sleep with a blanket or a teddy bear; every time she lay down for a nap I'd have to go with her. Eric thought it was a habit we should break; how else would she ever be able to go to sleep without me?

I had asked him, Why should she ever have to?

The Fasten Seat Belt sign dings, and I help Sophie into her seat and tighten the band around her waist. The plane pushes off from the jetway and rolls backward, heading onto the tarmac for takeoff. When the plane begins to accelerate and the nose rises up like a rocket, Sophie turns to me. “Are we flying?” My father and I used to have picnics at the airfield in Lebanon and watch the Cessnas and Pipers take off and land. We'd lie on our backs with the grass tickling our shoulders as the little planes vanished into colossal clouds, then reappeared like magic. When I asked him what kept a plane from falling out of the sky, he made me sit up and blow across the top of a paper napkin to see it rise like a flag in the wind. “When the air moves faster on the top of the wings than the bottom,” he told me, “the plane lifts.”

So I am ready when Sophie asks me this question. It's all about pressure. When it comes at you from all sides equally, nothing moves. But if one side exerts more than the other, you just might find yourself in flight.

I wonder if she has dimples, like me. If she can bend her thumbs all the way backward, double-jointed, like Sophie and I can. If she gave me my black hair or my fear of insects. If her labor was anything like mine.

I have spent so long sculpting her in my imagination, a combination of Marion Cunningham and Carol Brady and Ma Walton and Mrs. Cosby. She will cry when she sees me and hold me so tight that I can't breathe, and even then I will notice how seamlessly my body fits against hers. She will not be able to find words big enough to tell me how much she loves me.

But there is another voice in my head, one that knows things are different if my mother has, in fact, been alive all this time. Why didn't she try harder to find me?

All I ever really wanted in a mother is someone who could not be dragged from me, kicking and screaming, no matter how powerful the force of separation was. Someone who would give up her life if it meant I couldn't be a part of it. Someone my father has always been.

When I fall asleep during the flight, I dream. He has just finished planting a lemon tree in my backyard. I want to make lemonade, but there isn't any fruit on the tree yet. It looks naked under that electric sky; all angles and switchbacks, skinny arms shivering.

His hands pat the dirt down at the bottom of the tree. He turns to me but the sun is in my eyes and I smile back without really seeing his face. In my lap is a striped cat; I feel for the missing stub of its tail and it bolts out of my clutches, between two barrel cacti that remind me of munchkins from The Wizard of Oz. “What do you think, Beth?” he asks.

The dust stains his palms red, and when he wipes them on his jeans there are two upside-down five-fingered prints that become long-necked dinosaurs with their heads reaching toward each other. I think I want a dinosaur. I want a seal, too, to keep in the bathtub.

I tell him this, and he laughs. “I know what you want, grilla,” he says, and then he swings me into his arms and so high that the sun kisses blisters onto the soles of my feet.

Arriving at Sky Harbor Airport is, I imagine, like landing on Mars–jagged mountains and blood-red soil as far as I can see. I step out of the double glass doors and walk into a solid wall of heat. I wonder how a place like this and a place like New Hampshire could possibly be part of the same country. There is already a message on my cell phone from Eric–an address, actually. The lawyer sponsoring him to try a case in this state is an old classmate from law school, and someone–his secretary's cousin's friend, or something equally as complicated–has agreed to let us stay in her house while she moves in with her boyfriend.

I collect a skittish Greta from the oversized-baggage area, rent an SUV (How long do you need it? the clerk had asked, and I had stared at the woman blankly), and pile our luggage into the backseat and trunk around the collapsible dog cage. Going through the motions only reminds me of the thousand things I don't know: what the grocery store chains are out here; how to get to this house on Los Brazos Street; when I will see my father again. Sophie's backpack slips to her elbows, her hand rides on the taut pull of Greta's leash. She follows me, bouncing on the balls of her feet, trusting me to know where we're going.

Don't all children?

Didn't I?

We follow the Avis representative's directions, passing more stores and shopping malls than there are in all of New Hampshire. There seems to be a supplier for everything you might ever want or need–sushi, motorized scooters, bronze sculpture, paint-your-own ceramicware. I feel absolutely lost out here, and that, actually, is a relief. In Arizona I am not supposed to know anything; this is all naturally foreign. Unlike Wexton, here I have the right to wake up in the morning and not remember who or where I am.