Vanishing Acts (7 page)

What I saw most in you, though, was your mother.

You had an uncanny ability to find things: the diamond earring Eric's mother lost somewhere in her driveway; the old stash of comic books hidden behind a loose panel of wood in the basement; a buffalo-head nickel caught between the cracks of the sidewalk. Unlike Elise, who could discover parts of a person they didn't even know were absent, you specialized in the tangible, but that, I feared, was only a matter of time.

When you were seven, you found a chickadee's egg that had fallen out of a nest. The egg was cracked and the bird, still embryonic and developing, was pink-skinned and pale, oddly humanistic. You and I lined a matchbox with tissues and held a private burial. “Wilbur,” you intoned, “lived a short life, full of danger.” Not unlike your own.

You cried for a week over that damn bird–the first time that finding something, for you, became equated to loss. That was when I realized that I could take you to the far ends of the earth, but! couldn't keep your mother from surfacing. Elise was in your blood; Elise was printed upon you. And, like Elise, I was terrified that if you grew up able to find whatever it was that hollowed out a person's heart, you would wind up feeling just as empty as she had.

God forbid, maybe you'd try to fill yourself the same way.

I made a few phone calls and took you to meet a policeman who happened to be the son of one of the seniors who played mah-jongg every Tuesday at the center. Art was a state trooper who had a German shepherd named Jerry Lee, known for his search-and-rescue ability. He let you play hide and seek with Jerry Lee, who always won. By the time we drove home that day, you knew what you wanted to be when you grew up.

There is a fine line between seeing something that's lost as missing, and seeing it as something that might be found. The way I figured, it was my job to make sure that you were focused correctly. In high school, I got you an apprenticeship with a local vet. In college, you adopted a hound from a shelter, and trained it for search and rescue. As a senior, you made your first big rescue: a little boy who had wandered off at a county fair. You began to get a reputation for hard work and diligence; you were called in to work with K-9 units all over New Hampshire and Vermont. I have heard you tell the story of how you got started in this business over and over to reporters and to grateful victims; you always say it began when you found a bird.

I'm not even sure you remember anymore that it was dead.

Sometimes parents don't find what they're looking for in their child, so they plant seeds for what they'd like to grow there instead. I've witnessed this with the former hockey player who takes his son out to skate before he can even walk. Or in the mother who gave up her ballet dreams when she married, but now scrapes her daughter's hair into a bun and watches from the wings of the stage. We are not, as you'd expect, orchestrating their lives; we are not even trying for a second chance. We're hoping that if this one thing takes root, it might take up enough light and space to keep something else from developing in our children: the disappointment we've already lived.

Last night, before my arraignment, I started shaking. Not shivering, but the palsied kind of seizure that even made the guards bring me to the infirmary for a free nurse's check, not that she could find anything wrong. It was the sort of tremor that astronauts get when they come back to earth, that a hiker suffers after coming back down from the crest of Kilimanjaro–a bone-deep chill that has nothing to do with cold and everything with being moved from one world to another. It continued the whole time the guards snapped on handcuffs and led me underground to the court building next door; it continued while I waited in the sheriff's department cell there; it continued until the moment I saw you in the courtroom and called your name.

You couldn't look me in the eye, and that was the first time I ever had doubts about what I did.

“Hey,” my cellmate says. “You gonna eat your bread?” A twenty-year-old awaiting trial for armed robbery, my cellmate's name is Monteverde Jones. I toss him my bread, which is stale enough to be classified as a weapon. We are fed in our cells, given an unappetizing array of blots on a plastic tray that blend together like Venn diagrams.

Because Monte has been here longer than I have, he gets to eat on the bunk. Me, I have to sit on the toilet or the floor. Everything is based on hierarchy and privilege; in this, jail's a lot like the real world. “So,” he says, “what do you do on the outside?”

I look up over my fork. “I run a senior citizens' center.”

“Like a nursing home?”

“The opposite,” I explain. “A place for active seniors to come and socialize. We had league sports and chess tournaments and season tickets to the Red Sox.”

“No shit,” Monte says. “My grandma, she's in one of those places where they just give her oxygen and wait for her to die.” He takes out a pen that he has whittled to a sharp point, a makeshift knife, and begins to run it under his nails. “How long you been doing that?”

“Since I moved to Wexton,” I tell him. “Almost thirty years.”

“Thirty years?” Monte shakes his head. “That's, like, forever.” I look down at my tray. “Not really,” I say.

If I had been allowed to make my phone call to you, this is what I would have said:

How are you? How's Sophie?

I'm fine. I'm stronger than you'd think.

I wish it hadn't happened this way.

I will see you in Arizona, and explain.

I know.

I'm not sorry, either.

Fitz

I'm not prepared for what I see when I turn the corner onto the street where I grew up. Two news vans from the Boston area are parked in the driveway of what used to be Eric's childhood home. In front of Andrew Hopkins's little red Cape is a lineup of television reporters, each facing a cameraman whose job it is to carve out a small square of background and make it look as if no other journalist has stumbled onto this grand story. This is a plum assignment, and under any other circumstance I might find myself sitting alongside the others, bumming cigarettes and thermoses of coffee while we wait for the Victim to peek out the front door. I park the car and circle around the media into my former backyard. A gay couple lives here now, with their adopted daughter–the gardens are far more manicured than anything my parents were ever able to pull off. But there's still a corner of the chain-link fence behind the rhododendrons that's bent up, just high enough for you to squeeze underneath into Delia's yard–a secret passage where we'd leave each other notes and treasures. I walk up the back door and let myself inside. “Dee?” I call out. “It's me.”

When there's no answer, I wander into the kitchen. Delia is dressed in jeans and one of Eric's sweaters; her hair is a wild black tangle around her face and her feet are bare. She is hunched over the counter, with the phone pressed to her ear. Underneath the kitchen table, Sophie sits in her nightgown, lining up plastic farm animals into military formation. “Fitz!” she says when she sees me. “Guess what? I couldn't go to school today because all the cars were in the way.”

“Could you check again?” Delia says into the phone. “Maybe under E. Matthews?”

I kneel beside Sophie and hold my finger up to my lips: quiet. But Delia slams down the phone instead and swears like a sailor–the same Delia who once nearly took my head off for saying the word damn in Sophie's presence when she was only three months old. When she looks up at me, her eyes are full of tears. “They must have told her about me ... about us being here in New Hampshire, but she hasn't called, Fitz.”

There are all sorts of excellent reasons for this: Delia's mother doesn't live in Arizona now, and hasn't been told yet of Andrew's apprehension; she's not even alive anymore. But I don't have the heart to point these out to Delia.

“Maybe she's afraid you won't want to talk to her, with your father's arrest and all,” I say after a minute.

“That's what I thought, too. So I figured . . . maybe I'll just call her, instead. The thing is ... I can't find her. I don't know if she's remarried or if she goes by her maiden name. ... I don't even know what her maiden name is. She's still a total stranger.”

I stick my head under the table. “Soph,” I say, “I'll give you a dollar if you go upstairs and find Mommy's purple nail polish before I finish counting. One, two, three . . .”

She is off like a shot. “I don't wear nail polish,” Delia says wearily.

“No kidding.” I step toward her. “What have you told Sophie, anyway?”

“She saw the police take her grandfather away in handcuffs. What was I supposed to say to her?” Delia shakes her head. “I told her it was just a game, like the one we were playing when the cops came.” She closes her eyes. “Trouble.”

“Where's Eric?”

“At the office. Filing paperwork to try a case in Arizona.” Her voice stumbles over the words, and she sinks into a chair. “You want to hear something funny, Fitz? I used to wish every night that my mother was still alive. I'm not talking about when I was a kid, I mean as recently as a week ago. You know . . . like when Sophie was a tooth in the school play and I wished my mother could have seen her, or when I had to pick out the dishes for the main course at the wedding and I couldn't even pronounce half of the ones on the caterer's list. I used to pretend that there had been some hospital mix-up, and that my mother would show up saying it had all been an awful mistake. Well, look at what happens when you get what you ask for: I have a mother, but I have no idea who I am. I don't know my actual birthday. I don't even know if I'm really thirty-one. And I thought I knew my father ... but it turns out that was the biggest lie of all.”

Vanishing Acts

“He's the same man you grew up with,” I say carefully, treading over a minefield full of false comfort. “He's the same man he was yesterday.”

“Is he?” Delia retorts. “I've been through some pretty awful situations with Eric, but I never thought about picking Sophie up and stealing her away so that he'd never see her again. I can't imagine a person ever getting to that point. But my own father apparently did.”

I could tell her from personal experience that when people we love make choices, we don't always understand them. But we can go on loving them, just the same. It isn't a matter of comprehension. It's forgiveness.

But all this took me a lifetime to discover, and where has it gotten me? To the point where, if Delia asks me to jump, I strap on my moon boots. Some lessons can't be taught, they simply have to be learned.

“I'm sure he had a reason for doing what he did,” I say. “I'm sure he wants to talk to you.”

“And then what happens? Are we supposed to go back to the way it used to be? I don't quite see us meeting my mother for dinner every other Sunday and laughing about old times. And I don't know how I'm ever supposed to be able to listen to what he says without wondering if he's telling me the truth.” She starts to cry. “I wish this never happened,” she says. “I wish I'd never found out.” I hesitate a second before hauling her into my arms–touching Delia is something I am always careful about; it comes at such great cost to me. I feel her heart beat hard against mine, two prisoners communicating through a cell-block wall. I understand better than she'd imagine that history is indelible. You can mask it; you can patch it smooth and clear; but you will always know what's hidden underneath. I find myself selfishly leaning closer, so that I breathe in the scent of her hair. Delia taught me that human scents are like snowflakes–each one's different. Blindfolded, I could find Delia by smell alone: She is lily-milk and snow, fresh-cut grass in summer, the perfume of my childhood.

She shifts, so the softest skin below her ear brushes against my lips, and that's all it takes for me to jump back as if I've been burned. I know what it's like to wake up thinking you will be able to cast the people who play the starring roles in your life, only to realize that you have to watch it from the audience. For Delia, the whole play has changed in the middle, and the least I can do is to be her constant. She had always trusted me to fix what's wrong: a dead car battery, a flooded basement, a broken heart. This time, I am out of my league, but I try to rescue her anyway. I'll be the hero now; soon enough Delia will realize that there's reason to think of me as the villain.

“Sophie!” I yell. “Time's up!” She appears breathlessly at the bottom of the stairs.

“Mommy doesn't have–”

“Get your coat,” I say. “You're going to school.” Sophie is still young enough to be delighted by this news. She runs off to the mudroom, while Delia glances out the window into the driveway. “Did you happen to notice the jackals outside?”

I push aside the image of what Delia will think when she sees tomorrow's paper.

“Yeah,” I say, keeping my tone light, “but I'm one of them, and we don't eat our own.”

“I don't want to go out–”

“But you need to,” I say. The last thing Delia should do is sit around waiting for the phone to ring, letting her mind wander enough to wonder why her mother might not be calling–none of which will lead to the outcome she's dreamed of her whole life.

Sophie skids to a stop in front of me, and I squat down to zip up her coat. “We're dropping her off,” I tell Delia, “and then we're going directly to jail.” This morning I was called into the business offices of the New Hampshire Gazette by my editor, a woman named Marge Geraghy who smokes Cuban cigars and insists on calling me by my full godawful name. “Fitzwilliam,” she said, “take a seat.”

I sank into the ratty armchair across from her desk. The New Hampshire Gazette is exactly what you'd imagine of a paper you can, literally, read in its entirety during a visit to the bathroom–dingy gray walls, fluorescent lights, thrift-store furniture. There is a decent reception area and one nice conference room, for the one time a year when the governor of New Hampshire graces our offices for an interview. It's no wonder that most of the reporters choose to work from their homes instead of their cubicles.

“Fitzwilliam,” Marge repeated. “I want to talk to you about this kidnapping case.” On her desk she has the paper spread open to my article–page A2, because yesterday there was also a murder-suicide down in Nashua. “What about it?” I asked.

“Your piece was missing something.”

I raised a brow. “It's all there. The facts, the history to date, and the plea. If you're looking to make an arraignment more sexy, you'll have to watch The Practice.”

“I'm not criticizing your technique, Fitzwilliam, just your effort.” She blew a smoke ring into my face. “Did you ever wonder why I pulled you off the Strange But True story to cover this instead?”

“Sheer human mercy?”

“No, because of what you could bring to the piece. You grew up in Wexton. Maybe you even crossed paths with this family–at church, at a school graduation, whatever. You can make this personal... even if you have to make it all up. I don't want the legal crap. I want the family drama.”

I wondered what Marge would say if she knew that not only did I grow up in Wexton, I grew up next door to Andrew Hopkins. That, all drama aside, Delia is my family. I wondered if she would understand that sometimes being close to an issue is not a good thing for a writer. That sometimes it means you can't see clearly. But then Marge lifted up an envelope. “An open e-ticket,” she announced. “I want you to follow this guy to Arizona and get the exclusive.” And that, really, was what made me agree. After all, I am a man who has never gotten very far from Delia Hopkins, no matter how I've tried. You can widen the feet of a compass, but they are still attached at the top; you can spin them away from each other, but you always wind up where you started. If Andrew is extradited to Arizona, and Delia follows, I am going to wind up there sooner or later. The New Hampshire Gazette might as well foot the bill.

I plucked the envelope out of Marge's hand. I would figure out, later, how to explain to Delia that I was writing an expose on her heartache. I would figure out, later, how to explain to my boss that, for me, Delia will never be a story, but a happy ending.

Delia and I walk Sophie into the classroom because she's late, and because the teacher is brand new, having just taken over for Sophie's regular teacher while she's on maternity leave. I hang Sophie's coat on a little hook near her cubby and take her lunchbox out of her knapsack. A teacher who seems small enough, and nearly young enough, to be a student gets up and approaches Sophie, squatting down to her level. “Sophie! I'm glad you could join us.”

“There's television people in my driveway,” Sophie announces. Amazingly, the teacher's smile never wavers. “Isn't that interesting!” she says.

“Why don't you join Mikayla and Ryan's group?”

As Sophie runs off, already focused on what's next, the teacher draws us aside.

“Ms. Hopkins, we read about your father's arraignment in the paper. All of us here want you to know that if there's anything we can do to help ...”

“I'd just like Sophie to stay busy,” Delia replies woodenly. “She doesn't really know what's going on with my father.”

“Of course,” the teacher agrees, and she glances at me. “She's lucky to have two supportive parents right now.”

Too late, she realizes this is probably not the smartest comment, given the circumstances. She blushes a deep red, then an even deeper hue when both Delia and I hasten to explain that I'm not Sophie's father.

There have been times, I'll admit, that I wished I was. Like when Delia put my hand on her belly so that I could feel Sophie kicking inside, and I thought: I should have been the one to make that happen. But for all the nights I lay in bed as a teenager, imagining what it would be like to be Eric, with the freedom to touch her whenever I wanted, or breathing in the smell of my pillow after she'd sprawled on my bed studying for a test on Hamlet, or even feeling my pulse jump when we were both patting Greta after a find and our hands brushed–for all those times, there were a thousand others that did not belong to me.

By now, the teacher is so tangled up in the kite strings of her embarrassment that she couldn't fly straight if she wanted to. “We have to go,” I say to Delia, and I drag her out of the classroom. “I thought I'd save the poor woman before she put both of her feet in her mouth at once,” I explain. “How old is she? Eleven? Twelve?”

“I didn't get to say good-bye to Sophie.”

We stop for a moment at the plate-glass window, watching Sophie make a block pattern out of colored circles and squares.

“She'll never know.”

“I bet the teacher noticed. She'll probably tell the school guidance counselor that I just picked up and left. They're all waiting to see how far the apple falls from the tree, you know.”

“Since when do you care what anyone thinks about you?” I ask. “That's the kind of crap I'd expect to hear from Bethany Matthews, not Delia Hopkins.” I hear Delia suck in her breath at the sound of that forbidden name.

“Bethany Matthews,” I continue blithely, “is always the first one parked at the curb to pick up her daughter. Bethany Matthews thinks that the pinnacle of personal success is being president of the PTA for four consecutive years. Bethany Matthews never serves frozen pizza for dinner because she's forgotten to defrost.”

“Bethany Matthews would not have gotten pregnant before she was married,” Delia says. “Bethany Matthews wouldn't even let her daughter play with a child who was the product of that kind of broken household.”

“Bethany Matthews still wears velvet headbands,” I laugh. “And baggy granny underwear.”

“Bethany Matthews throws like a girl.”

“Bethany Matthews,” I say, “is no fun to be around.”

“Thank God I'm nothing like her,” Delia replies, and then she turns to me and smiles.

I dated Delia first. We were in middle school and it didn't mean anything at all–if you said you were going out with a girl, it basically meant that you walked her to her bus at the end of the school day. I did it because everyone else seemed to be asking girls out, and Delia was the only one I really talked to. I broke up with her because as cool as it had been to have a girlfriend the week before, it was uncool to have one the following week. I told her that maybe we should spend a little time hanging out with other people.

I realized too late that the look on Delia's face when I did it was one I had never seen before–and with good reason: It was the first time in our lives that any of us three wanted to ration the amount of time we spent in

one another's company. In a fit of conscience, I went to find Delia in the gym. I was going to tell her that I didn't mean it, that words without thought behind them were like deflated balloons, unable to go anywhere, but instead I spied her dancing with Eric. He had his arms around her, with an easy confidence I didn't have. He touched her as if parts of her belonged to him, and maybe, after all these years, they did.

On Eric's face I saw my own mistake. It brightened his eyes and narrowed his focus so much that I thought of yelling Fire to see if he'd even hear. He looked the way I felt around Delia: as if a second sun was growing underneath my breastbone, a secret I could barely conceal. The difference, though, was how Delia was looking back at him. Unlike the hours we'd spent as an alleged couple–when we'd argue who would be the starting pitcher for the Sox, or whether Spider-Man could kick Batman's ass in an arm-wrestling competition–Delia had nothing to say when she was staring up at Eric. He took away all her words, and I had never been able to do that.

There were times, when we were getting older, that I thought of telling her how I really felt. I convinced myself that even if I lost Eric's friendship forever as a result, I'd still have Delia to make up for it. But then I'd remember that moment when she and Eric were swaying in the middle school gym, with streamers caught on the bottoms of their shoes and a DJ playing REO Speedwagon; and I'd realize that even if all three of us had grown up, Delia and Eric still looked at each other as if the rest of the world had fallen away, myself included. I could lose one of them, but I didn't think I could stand to lose both.

Once, I slipped–I kissed her when we were horsing around on the shore of the Connecticut River. But I made a joke of it, the way I did when anything came too close for comfort. If I'd said what I really wanted to when she was floating with me in the reeds, her hands tight on my shoulders and her mouth a flower beneath mine, I might have wound up with her staring speechless at me, too. But what if it wasn't because I took her breath away? What if it was because she couldn't say back to me the things I said to her?

When you love someone, you want her to have everything she wants. In Delia's case, that has always been Eric.

The Grafton County Correctional Facility hunches like a sleeping bear at the end of Route 10 in Haverhill, yoked at the neck to its sister building, the courthouse. As we drive up and park my car, I can feel Delia's eyes go straight to the razor wire at the top of the fence.