Vanishing Acts (38 page)

“No.”

“Now, Mrs. Nguyen, you said you saw a three-year-old child come to school with unbrushed hair, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“You testified that she was sometimes hungry.”

“Yes.”

“You said that she'd wear the same clothes to school three days in a row.”

“Yes.”

The prosecutor shrugs. “Doesn't that describe just about any four-year-old child, at some point?”

“Yes, but this wasn't a onetime occurrence.”

“As a teacher, have you ever been in contact with the Department of Children Protective Services?”

“Unfortunately, yes. We're required by law to report abuse. The minute we believe a child is in extreme danger, we make the call.”

“And yet you didn't report Elise Matthews, did you?” Emma points out. “Nothing further.”

Your favorite toys, as a child, were animals. Stuffed and beanbag, enormous and minuscule–it didn't matter, as long as you could arrange them around the house in some sort of complicated scenario. You weren't the kind of kid who wanted to play

“vet.” Instead, you'd pretend that you were a rescue worker intent on making your way up Everest to rescue a stranded mountain lion, but halfway up one of your sled dogs would break its leg, and it was up to you to do field surgery before continuing on to save the wildcat. You would steal bandages from the first-aid kit at the senior center and erect a triage center under the dining room table; the mountain lion was a stuffed cat hiding under the couch in the den; in the bathroom you had tweezers and toothpicks in your surgical suite. I used to watch you. I used to wonder if you were just a natural expert at reinventing the world, or if I'd somehow made you that way.

The whole way back to jail I feel the elements of my body resisting; a magnetic pole that has become so similar to the one it's approaching it cannot help but be repelled. But almost immediately, a detention officer comes to tell me I've got a visitor. I expect Eric, coming to practice tomorrow's testimony with me until it runs like a well-oiled machine, but instead of being escorted to a conference room for attorneys and their clients, I'm led to a central booth. It isn't until I am nearly face-to-face with her that I realize Elise has come to see me. Her dark hair is a waterfall. She has writing on the inside of her palm and up her left arm. “Some things never change,” I say softly, and point. She glances down. “Oh. Well. I needed a cheat sheet on the stand.” When she smiles at me, the little cubicle I am trapped in swells with heat. “It's good to see you. I just wish it was under different circumstances.”

Vanishing Acts

“I'd settle for a different venue,” I say.

She bows her head, and when she looks up, her face is flushed. “It sounds like you've had a very good life in Wexton. All those senior citizens . . . they adore you.”

“A poor substitute,” I joke, but it falls flat. I look from the crooked part of her hair to the eyetooth that's twisted the tiniest bit–the little flaws that made her more striking instead of less so. Why had she never been able to understand that?

“You're still so goddamned beautiful,” I murmur. “In twenty-eight years, you know, I still haven't met anyone else who talks back to characters in the middle of a movie. Or who stops using punctuation because it's cramping the style of the alphabet.”

“Well, I learned a little from you, too, Charlie,” Elise says. “A very wise pharmacist once told me that there are certain elements you can't mix together, because even though it seems like they'd be perfect together, they're lethal. Bleach and ammonia, for example. Or you and me.”

“Elise–”

“I loved you so much,” she whispers.

“I know,” I say quietly. “I just wished you'd loved yourself a little more.”

“Do you ever think about him?” Elise asks. “The baby?” I nod slowly. “I wonder how much would have been different, if he'd–”

“Don't say it.” There are tears in her eyes. "Let's do it this way, Charlie, all right?

Let's pick just one sentence out of all of the ones we should have said–the best, most important sentence–and let's say just that."

This is my old Elise–whimsical, loopy–the one I couldn't help but fall for. And because I know she is sinking in the quicksand of regret, just like me, I nod. “Okay. But I go first.” I try to remember what it was like to be loved by someone who did not know limits, and had not yet been ruined by that. “I forgive you,” I whisper; a gift.

“Oh, Charlie,” Elise says, and she gives me one right back. “She turned out absolutely perfect.”

In the blue light of the cell, I make a mental list of the best moments of my life. They aren't the milestones you'd imagine; they are the tiniest seconds, the flashes of time. You writing a note for the tooth fairy, asking if you had to go to college to be one. Waking up to find you curled up in bed beside me. You asking if I'd made the pancakes from scrap. You fishing, and then refusing to touch whatever you caught. You reaching into my pocket for quarters to feed the downtown meter. You doing cartwheels on the front lawn, looking like a long-legged spider. You spinning cotton candy and getting the sugar all over your hair. Pulling back the curtain of the magic box so you could step inside in your tiny sequined suit. Drawing it aside, so we could all see you reappear.

The amazing thing is, I could sit here for hours and still not run out of the best moments of my life. There are twenty-eight years' worth of them. From up here, it's different. There's a flimsy railing between me and the rest of the courtroom–this witness stand–but that doesn't keep their eyes from striking me like hammers. “It was the Saturday before Father's Day,” I say, looking right at Eric.

“Beth was excited, because she'd made me some card with a tie on it at nursery school. When I picked her up, she practically flew out to the car. We had a barbecue and went to the zoo. But then she remembered that she'd forgotten her blanket, the one she slept with. I told her we'd swing by the house and pick it up.”

“When you got there, what did you see?”

“There was no answer when I knocked. I went around to the side windows and saw Elise passed out in a puddle of her own vomit in the entryway. Dog feces and urine were all over the floor. And broken glass.”

I see Emma Wasserstein lean back as Elise taps her on the shoulder. The two women whisper for a moment.

“What did you do next?” Eric asks, bringing me back to focus.

“I thought about going in, and cleaning her up, like I'd done a thousand times before. And like a thousand times before, Beth would watch me do it. And one day, she'd be the one taking care of her mother.” I shook my head. “I just couldn't do it anymore.”

“There had to have been an alternative,” Eric says, playing Devil's Advocate.

“I'd already given her an ultimatum. After our second baby was stillborn, she started drinking so heavily that I couldn't make excuses for her anymore, and I got her to enroll in a treatment program. She dried out, for a month's time, and then she was drinking more than ever. Eventually I filed for divorce, but that only took me out of the situation. Not my daughter.”

“Why didn't you contact the authorities?”

“Back then no one believed a father could do as good a job raising a kid as a mother. . . even an alcoholic one. I was afraid if I asked the court for more time with Beth, I'd lose all visitation rights with her.” I look down at the ground. “They weren't too sympathetic to fathers who had prior convictions; as it was, the only reason I'd gotten as much time with Beth as I had was because Elise hadn't contested it.”

“What was the prior conviction for?” Eric asks.

“I had spent a night in jail after a fight, once.”

“Who was the person you assaulted?”

“Victor Vasquez,” I say. “The man Elise wound up marrying.”

“Can you tell the court why you fought with Victor?” I run my thumbnail into a groove of the wood. Now that this moment is here, it's harder than I thought to make the words come out. “I found out that he was having an affair with my wife,” I say bitterly. “I beat him up pretty badly and Elise called the police.”

“In light of that incident, you were nervous about asking the authorities to revisit the custody agreement?”

“Yes. I thought they'd look at the petition and think I was doing it to get back at Elise.”

“So.” Eric faces the jury. “You'd already tried to get Elise to participate in her own rehabilitation, and it didn't work. You saw obstacles lying in front of you if you took legal action. What did you do next?”

“I had run out of options, the way I saw it. I couldn't leave Bethany there, and I couldn't let this keep happening. I wanted my daughter to have a normal life–no, a better than normal life. And I thought that maybe if I got her as far away from all of this as I could, we could both start over. I thought maybe she was even young enough to completely forget that this was the way she'd spent the first four years of her life.” I look up at you, watching me with haunted eyes from the gallery. “As it turned out, I was right.”

“What did you do next?”

“I took Beth and drove to my condo. I packed as much stuff as I could into the car, and then I started to drive east.”

Eric guides me through a narrative of flight, a web of lies, an outline of how to reinvent oneself. I answer more of his questions–ones about life in Wexton, ones that dovetail with the spot where he began to overlap with our lives. And then he reaches the end of this act, the one we have practiced. “When you took your daughter, Andrew, did you know what you were doing was against the law?” I look at the jury. “Yes.”

“Can you imagine what would have happened to Delia if you hadn't taken her away?”

It is a question Eric's not expecting to get in, and sure enough, the prosecutor objects.

“Sustained,” the judge says.

He has told me that this will be the last question, that he wants to leave the jury thinking about the answer to the question I am not allowed to give. But as Eric heads toward the defense table again, he suddenly stops and pivots. “Andrew?” he asks, as if it is just the two of us, and something he's wanted to know all along. “If you had the chance, would you change what you did?”

We haven't rehearsed this answer, and maybe it's the only one that really matters. I turn, so that I am staring square at you; so that you know, all my life, anything I've ever said or buried beneath silence was just for you. “If I had the chance,” I reply, “I'd do it all over again.” IX

But what do you keep of me?

The memory of my bones flying up into your hands.

–Anne Sexton, "The Surgeon''

Eric

Maybe I'm not going to lose this case, after all.

It's clear Andrew's broken the law–he has admitted it, as well as a lack of remorse-but he's got a few sympathetic jurors. One Hispanic woman, who started crying when he talked about Delia growing up, and one older lady with a tight silver perm, who was nodding along with pity. Two, count 'em, two–when it only takes one to hang a jury.

But then again, Emma Wasserstein hasn't attacked yet. I sit beside Chris, my nails digging into the armrests of the chair. He leans closer to me. “Fifty bucks says she goes for rage.”

“Lying,” I murmur back. “She's got that one in the bag already.” The prosecutor walks toward Andrew; I try to will him faith and composure. Do not fuck this up, I think. I can do that myself.

“For twenty-eight years,” Emma says, “you've been lying to your daughter, haven't you.”

“Well, technically.”

“You've been lying about who you are.”

“Yes,” Andrew admits.

“You've been lying about who she is.”

“Yes.”

“You've been lying about all aspects of your former life.”

“Yes.”

“In fact, Mr. Hopkins, there's an excellent chance that you're lying to all of us right now.”

I feel Chris stuff something stiff into my hand; when I look down, it's a fifty-dollar bill.

“I'm not,” Andrew insists. “I have not lied in this courtroom.”

“Really,” Emma says flatly.

“Yes, really.”

“What if I told you I could prove otherwise?”

Andrew shakes his head. “I'd say you're mistaken.”

“You told this court, under oath, that you came home to get a security blanket for your daughter... and you found Elise Matthews drunk, lying amidst vomit and broken glass and dog feces. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Would it surprise anyone in this courtroom to learn that Elise Vasquez is allergic to dogs? That she never owned one, either while you were living with her or anytime afterward?”

Oh, shit.

Andrew stares at her. “I never said it was her dog. I'm just telling you what I saw.”

"Are you, Mr. Hopkins? Or are you telling this court what you want them to see?

Are you painting this situation to be worse than it really was, to justify your own heinous actions?"

“Objection,” I mumble.

“Withdrawn,” Emma says. “Let's give you the benefit of the doubt, then; let's say your memory of the state of the house is flawless, even after almost thirty years. However, you also said that after finding your wife in this state, and feeling unfairly persecuted by the authorities, you went back to your condo and packed as much as you could into your car, and started driving east with your daughter. Do I have that right?”

“Yes.”

“Would you classify your decision to abscond with your daughter as impulsive?”

“Absolutely,” Andrew says.

“Then what made you close out your bank account on the previous Friday morning, a full day before you picked Bethany up for her custody visit?” Andrew takes a deep breath, just like I've told him to. “I was in the process of switching banks,” he says, “It was a coincidence.”

“I'll bet,” Emma remarks. “Let's talk about your good intentions for a moment. You said you brought your daughter to Harlem with you, to a crack house, when you purchased those identities?”

“Yes, I did.”

“You brought a four-year-old along to watch you commit a crime?”

“I wasn't committing a crime,” Andrew says.

“You were purchasing someone else's identity. What do you think that is, Mr. Hopkins? Or is your set of laws different from everyone else's?”

“Objection,” I interrupt.

“Were there drug addicts at that crack house?” Emma asks.

“I assume so.”

“Might there have been needles on the floor?”

“It's possible, I don't really remember.”

“Were there individuals with guns or knives?”

“Everyone was busy doing their own thing, Ms. Wasserstein,” Andrew says. “I knew it wasn't Disneyland when I went in there, but I had no alternative.”

“So let me get this straight: You ran away with your daughter because you were worried about her safety . . . and took her less than a week later into a crack house to become an accessory to a crime?”

“All right,” Andrew admits heavily. “I did.”

“You never called Elise to let her know that her daughter was healthy and happy, did you.”

“No. I haven't had any contact with her.” He hesitates. “I didn't want her to be able to track us down.”

“You also never told your daughter that her mother was alive and well in Phoenix?”