Vanishing Acts (17 page)

Josephina looks up at me, wide-eyed. “What'll happen to her?”

“As the photo disintegrates, your roommate will feel more and more out of sorts. By the next full moon, she'll apologize for saying anything bad about you and she'll transfer to a college in a different state.”

A bright smile breaks over Josephina's face. She digs my fee-ten dollars–out of the front pocket of her jeans. “Thank you, Doña,” she gushes, just as Victor pokes his head in.

He has never approved of my side career, no matter how many times I have tried to explain to him that this is not a job but a calling. After a while, I began to keep the practice hidden. It was not that I was trying to lie to my husband, it was simply easier for both of us to pretend that I wasn't doing this anymore, even if we both knew better.

“This is Josephina,” I say, introducing the girl to Victor. “She volunteers with me at the Science Museum.”

Josephina thanks me again, and says she's going to be late for a class if she doesn't leave now. When Victor and I are alone, he puts his hands on my shoulders and kneads a bit. “How are you doing today?”

After your second visit yesterday, when I cried for hours, he was the one who sat across from me, rationing Kleenex. It was partly for moral support, partly because he loves me, and partly to remind me that no matter what, I shouldn't swallow my sorrow down with alcohol. “I'm okay,” I tell him. “For now.”

“She'll come around, Elise,” Victor assures me.

You haven't been in my life for twenty-eight years; why, then, after only an hour in your company, do I feel the absence so much more acutely?

Victor strokes his hand over my hair. Sometimes I think that when I am hurt, he is the one who bears the pain. If you had grown up with me, this is one of the things I would have tried to teach you: Marry a man who loves you more than you love him. Because I have done both now, and when it is the other way around, there is no spell in the world that can even out the balance.

The very first time I met your father, he tried to rescue me. I was working in the middle of nowhere, at a bar frequented by bikers–not clean-cut college boys with axle grease on their hands who wandered in, dazed, after their cars broke down. He saw me pinned against a wall by two Hell's Angels while a third threw darts at me, and he launched himself at the big man.

As it turned out, I wasn't in trouble; the bikers were all regulars and we did this little dog-and-pony show every now and then. But I fell in love with Charlie at that moment. It wasn't his golden good looks, or his attempt at heroism that sent my head spinning; it was the fact that he believed I was worth saving. I was one of the ghosthood of Mexican-Americans who lurked in the background of other people's lives–as chambermaids and bus-boys and gardeners. The only reason I was a bartender was because I could not sew a straight seam, so taking in piecework was not an option. Besides, I liked bartending. The yeasty smell of beer rising from the catch below the tap made me think of places where wheat grew, places I'd never been. Every time one of my customers got up and walked out the door, I let a little piece of me go with him. I thought that at this rate, sooner or later, I could vanish completely.

I gave your father a free drink, to thank him for trying to save me. I don't think he noticed that my hands were shaking, spilling beer all over the bar. Charlie pointed to my jeans, which were covered with couplets from poetry that I'd read. I collected words the way some people collected shells or butterfly specimens. “I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing,” he read aloud, but the rest of the e.e. cummings phrase snaked under my thigh, hidden.

“Than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance,” I finished.

“Why is that written on your leg?”

“Because,” I said, “I ran out of room on my jacket.”

“You must be an English major.”

“English majors smoke clove cigarettes and say things like deconstruction and onomatopoeia just to hear the sound of their voices.”

He started to laugh. “You're right. I used to date an English major. She was always looking at things like laundry in a dryer, or toast, and trying to relate them to the subtext of Paradise Lost.”

I knew men. My mother had taught me how to read the sentences they did not say out loud, how to wear a red cord tied around my left wrist to keep away the ones who only saw you as a single step, rather than a destination. I could tell by the bitter almond smell that rose off a man's skin whether he had cheated on his partners in the past. But the men I had known were like me–boys who had grown up dreaming in Spanish, boys who believed you could light a red candle for a dose of luck, boys who knew that a man who spoke ill of his girlfriend might find his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth when he awakened. Men like Charlie, on the other hand, went to universities and wrestled with mathematical theorems and combined chemicals to watch them rise in lovely clouds of invisible gas. Men like Charlie were not meant for girls like me.

“If you're not an English major,” he asked, “then what do you do?” I looked at him as if he were crazy–did he not see the four walls of this squat building around me? Did he think I was here because I liked the view? But I wanted him to know that there was more to me than just this job. I wanted him to think I was mysterious and different and anyone except the person I really was: a Mexican girl who did not live in the same world as people like him. So I took my deck of cards out from beneath the counter. “I read los naipes.”

“Tarot?” he said. “I don't buy that stuff.”

“Then you have nothing to lose.” I opened the wooden box that held my deck and removed them, as usual, with my left hand. Then I said an Ave, and looked up at him. “Don't you want to know if you'll get your wish?”

“What wish?”

“That,” I told him, “is up to you.”

He smiled so slowly that I had to look down. “All right then. Tell me my future.” I had him cut the deck three times, for the Holy Trinity, and hand them back to me.Then I laid out nine cards: four in the shape of the Cross, five and six balanced below the arms of it, seven at the base, eight tipped on its side at the very bottom, and the last card smack in the center of them all. “The first card,” I said, turning it over, “shows your state of mind.” It was the Seven of Wands.

“God, I hope it means money. Especially if it's my engine that's dead.”

“It's a message,” I told him. “It says that the truth can't stay hidden forever. These next three cards will tell you who's going to help you figure it out.” I flipped them over. “This is interesting. The Lovers, well, that's just what you'd think–a happy couple. Some sort of romantic relationship is going to be instrumental in helping you get what you want. The Strength card isn't as good as it sounds–it tells you not to take on more than you can handle. But I think that the Chariot cancels that out, because it's powerful, and means you're going to ultimately have good luck.”

I turned over cards five and six. “The Eight of Wands is a warning against ugly actions that might destroy you . . . and this card, the Hanged Man . . . have you been committing any crimes lately? Because that's usually what this represents–someone who better mend his ways, or God will get him even if the law doesn't.”

“I jaywalked yesterday,” Charlie said.

Cards seven and eight were the enemies plotting against him. “These are both great cards,” I said. “This is a child who's important to you, and who brings balance to your life.”

“I don't really know any kids.”

“A brother or sister?” I asked. “No nieces, nephews?”

“Not even a cousin.”

I started scrubbing down the bar, although it was perfectly clean. “Then maybe it's yours,” I said. “Sometime.”

His hand crossed the wood, fingered the card. “What's she going to look like?” The suit was Cups. “Light-skinned and dark-haired.”

“Like you,” he said.

I blushed, and busied myself by turning over the last card. “This lets you know if your wish will come true, or if all those other things will get in the way.” The card was the Seven of Cups–a wedding or alliance he would regret for the rest of his life. “So?” Charlie asked, and his voice rang with the future. “Do I get what I want?”

“Absolutely,” I lied, and then I leaned across the bar and kissed him over the map of our lives.

I never forgot you.

I have boxes, somewhere in the crawl space of the garage, full of the Christmas gifts and birthday presents you weren't here to open-stuffed animals and charm bracelets, sequined slippers and dress-up clothes that would have fit you way back when. Once Victor realized that I was still buying for you, he got upset–it wasn't healthy, he told me–and he made me promise I would stop. Not everyone under stands how you can spin two lassos at the same time, one of hope and one of grief. When the elementary school you might have attended held its fifth-grade send-off, I went to the auditorium and listened to everyone else's children dream of what they might grow up to be: a paleontologist, a recording star, the first astronaut to walk on Mars. I imagined you wearing braids, although that would have been too babyish a style for you by then. I celebrated your sweet sixteen at the Biltmore, where I made the penguin-breasted waiter serve tea for two, although you were not sitting across from me.

I never stopped hoping that you'd come home, but I did stop expecting it. Having your breath freeze up every time the doorbell chimes or the phone rings takes its toll on a person, and whether it is conscious or not, you eventually make the decision to divide your life in half–before and after–with loss being that tight bubble in the middle. You can move around in spite of it; you can laugh and smile and carry on with your life, but all it takes is one slow range of motion, a doubling over, to be fully aware of the empty space at your center.

When you love someone more than he loves you, you'll do anything to switch the scales. You dress the way you think he'd like you to dress. You pick up his favorite figures of expression. You tell yourself that if you re-create yourself in his image, then he will crave you the same way you crave him.

Maybe you understand what happened between me and Charlie better than anyone else would–when you are told you're someone you aren't, over and over, you begin to believe it. You live that life. But you are wearing a mask, one that might slip if you aren't careful. You wonder what he will do when he finds out. You know you are bound to disappoint him.

There was a moment, I admit, where I thought I had made him love me as much as I needed him to. When you were about eighteen months old, I got pregnant again. Charlie would sneak out of work during his lunch break and come home to me; he'd rest his head on my belly. Matthew Matthews, he'd say, trying names on for size to make me laugh. Banjo. Sprocket. No, Cortisone. Cort for short. He'd bring me little gifts from the pharmacy: chocolate candy bars, cocoa butter, butterfly hair clips.

I was twenty-one weeks along when my membranes ruptured. The baby was perfect–a little boy, the size of a human heart. I developed an infection; started bleeding. I was taken back to the OR, and given a hysterectomy. The doctors used words like uterine atony and artery ligation, disseminated intravascular coagulation, but all I heard was that I couldn't have any more children. I knew, even if no one was willing to say it to me, that this had been my fault, some fatal flaw in me. And when I came home from the hospital, I realized that Charlie knew this, too. He couldn't stand to look at me. He spent more and more time in the office. He took you with him.

I drank a lot before I met your father, but I honestly think it took that miscarriage to make me an alcoholic. I drank until I didn't see the regret in Charlie's eyes. I drank until even he could plainly see that I was a failure. I drank until I couldn't feel anything, most of all his touch. I think there was a part of me that knew if I drove him away, I would never have to say I'd been left behind.

But mostly I drank because that was when I could feel your baby brother, swimming through me like a silver fish. I didn't know until it was too late that trying to hold on to the baby I'd lost was going to cost me the child I already had. I can't remember the moment I understood that I had to turn my life around, but I do know why. I was terrified that the detective assigned to your case would call me with news, and I'd be passed out. Or that–miracle–you'd show up at my door when I was out on a bender. What hurts the most, after all this time, is realizing that you had to disappear before I could find myself. Two years after you were gone, I was completely sober, and I've never strayed since.

The detective who was assigned to your kidnapping retired in 1990. He lives on a houseboat in Lake Powell. He sends Christmas cards, with pictures of himself and his wife. He was the one who called me to tell me you'd been found. But before the phone rang that morning, I had already opened a carton of eggs to find them all upended and cracked; I had seen a line of fire ants spell out your initials on my driveway. By the time Detective LeGrande called, I already knew what he was going to say.

There is one reading of los naipas that a person can do for herself: El Evangelio. It involves spreading fourteen cards in the outline of the Gospel and then five more in the shape of the Cross. The first time I ever did El Evangelio, I was learning to read the cards at my mother's side. For many years, I stopped doing it altogether, because too often the Fool card came up in places I did not want to see it. But after you disappeared, I spread the cards every Sunday night. And every time, the same two major Arcana would appear somewhere in the Cross. Number fourteen,Temperance, warned of rash actions I'd regret for the rest of my life; number fifteen, the Devil, said that someone had been lying to me. After Detective LeGrande called, I took out los naipas. It was not a Sunday evening, and it was not in my santuario, just across the kitchen table. As always, the Devil and Temperance popped up in the Cross. But this time there were two other cards that I hadn't seen there before. The Star, which is the most potent card in the Tarot deck, and neutralizes the other cards around it. Set next to the Devil, like so, it meant that my old enemy was about to pay. From this day forth, your father would be powerless.