Vanishing Acts (33 page)

I try to draw an answer out of the heart of me, but can't. “I'm going to look for that aspirin,” I manage, and I walk into the bathroom.

I close the door behind me and sit down on the lid of the toilet. If I didn't have a headache to begin with, I'm certainly developing one now. I stand up and rummage through the medicine cabinet, which is a whole different kind of pain: Here are Delia's antiperspirant, her toothbrush, her birth control pills. Here is a layer of intimacy I haven't been granted.

There are no bottles of aspirin, so I find myself kneeling down under the sink and tearing apart the cabinet beneath it. Shampoo, Sophie's rubber duck, witch hazel. Pine Sol and Vaseline and suntan lotion. A soft stacked fortress of toilet paper rolls. That's when I see the whiskey. I reach deep into the cabinet and pull out the half-empty bottle that has been wedged into the corner. I carry it out of the bathroom in the crook of my elbow. Eric sits at the table, his back to me. “You find it?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I did.” I lean over his shoulder and set the bottle down on top of a file folder.

Eric freezes. “It's not what you think.”

I sit down across from him. "No? Then what's it for? Lighting the barbecue?

Stripping wallpaper?"

He gets up and closes the bedroom door, where Sophie is playing. “You have no idea what trying this case is like. And when Delia left... I just couldn't handle it anymore. I'm terrified of screwing up, Fitz.” He spears the fingers of one hand through his hair. “Andrew nearly got killed while I was off on my little bender,” he says. “Believe me, that was enough to sober me up fast. It was just a taste, honest. And I haven't touched it since then.”

“Just a taste?” I take the bottle off the table and walk to the sink, unscrew the cap, and pour the contents down the drain.

As Eric watches me, his features change. It's regret, and I know, because I've seen it every single morning on my own face.

I remember how we all loved Eric when he'd downed a few, how he was always the most charming, the smoothest, the funniest. I remember, too, what it was like when he could overturn a kitchen in three minutes flat; when Delia would show up on my doorstep, sobbing, because he'd locked himself in a room and it had been four days.

“Been there, seen it, got the T-shirt,” I say to Eric, and I throw the empty bottle at him so that he catches it. “Does she know?”

Eric shakes his head. “Are you going to tell her?” I would like to, more than anything. But I have become a master at not telling Delia the things I should have.

Without responding, I walk out the door of the trailer and then turn around. The mesh of the screen cuts Eric into a mosaic, a piecemeal Humpty Dumpty who cannot remember who he was before the fall. “You're right,” I say. “You don't deserve her.”

As I drive, I pick up my cell phone. I'm going to call Delia. I'm going to get this over with, once and for all.

I punch in her cell number and get a recording, stating that my number is not recognized by the cellular service.

I wait a few moments, thinking maybe I need to get to a part of the city covered by another set of towers, but five miles later and then ten, I receive the same message. I pull onto the side of the road and call the customer service hotline for the cellular company.

“Fitzwilliam MacMurray,” the rep says, as she looks up my number.

“That's me. What's the problem?”

“According to my records, your service was turned off two days ago. Oh, but there's a note in your records. It's a message from a Marge Geraghy.” My editor. “And?”

The rep hesitates. “It says that next time, you should remember that your cell phone bills go directly to the company. And that you're fired.” There is a beat on the line. “Is there anything else I can help you with?”

“Thanks,” I say. “I think that's plenty.” Shortly after midnight there is a knock on the door of my motel room. With the way my day has been going, I fully expect it to be the manager, telling me that my credit card has been revoked, too. But when I open it, Delia is standing on the other side. “Buy me a drink,” she says, and my heart leaps. I stare at her for a moment, and then dig into the front pocket of my jeans and hand her three quarters. “The soda machine's at the end of the hall.”

“I was hoping for something with proof.” She tilts her head. “How come it's called that, anyway?”

“Because moonshine used to be used for barter. If you could mix equal parts of the liquid with gunpowder and light it on fire, there was evidence it was at least fifty percent alcohol.”

Her mouth drops open. “Why do you know that?”

“I wrote a story about it once.” This would be the perfect opportunity for me to mention that Eric might be a more willing drinking buddy, that in fact he might have a bottle hidden right under their bed she could borrow. But instead I say, “You don't like to drink.”

“I know. But it works for everyone else when they want to escape.” I lean against the doorjamb. “What are you escaping from?”

“I can't sleep,” she admits. “I'm too worried about tomorrow.”

“What about Eric?”

“He can sleep.” She pushes her way into my room and sits down in the middle of the bed, whose covers haven't been disturbed.

The conversation comes so easily, I begin to wonder if I am the only one who was present during that devastating, magnificent kiss last night. Then I realize that Delia has come to give me a way out. Maybe if we both pretend it never happened, it will be true. There are plenty of people–rape victims and Holocaust survivors, widows and, God, kidnapping victims–whose worlds crack and splinter, who still manage to look back at the level horizon of their lives without seeing the break. But there's another part of me that knows no matter how Delia and I go forward from this point, it won't be the same. Because when she smiles, I will look away before it is contagious. When we sit beside each other, I will make sure that our shoulders do not brush. When we speak, there will be spaces between our words just the shape and size of that damn kiss.

I step away from her–one giant, mother-may-I step–toward the plastic expanse of the motel desk. It Is covered with stacks of paper, a Bic pen that has exploded like the Red Sea, a chain of gum wrappers. Tonight's dinner: a half-eaten Ring Ding.

“Actually, I'm busy,” I say. “I was working.”

“Oh,” she says, deflated. “Your Gazette piece.”

“The Gazette fired me.”

She turns. “You said you were writing a piece on my father's trial.”

“No,” I correct, “I said I was supposed to.” Delia crawls off the bed and walks toward the desk. She lets her fingers trail over the pages I have written all these weeks when I could not write anything else; pages that amassed in such quantity I never realized what I was producing. “Then what's this?”

I take a deep breath. “The story of you.”

She picks up the manuscript. “I was six years old the first time I disappeared,” she reads, the words coming alive for the first time. “Is that me, talking?” I nod. “That's the way I heard you, in my head.”

Delia leafs through the first few pages, and then pushes it into my arms. “Read it to me,” she demands.

So I clear my throat. “I was six years old the first time I disappeared, ” I repeat.

“My father was working on a magic act.” I read as Delia, as Eric, as Andrew, as myself. I read for hours. I read until my voice goes raw. I read until Delia falls asleep and I wake up in one of her dreams. I read until she takes over. And just as the sky starts blushing, she runs out of words.

“Why didn't you tell me?” she whispers.

“You had someone else.”

“The person you fall for when you're twelve might not be the same one you fall for when you're thirty-two.”

“Then again,” I say, “sometimes it is.”

We are curled in concentric circles, the polyester cover of the queen bed pooled around us. It reminds me of the divot a whale leaves on the smooth surface of the water after it breaches. A footprint, that's what it's called, because every one is different.

Delia would say it's just another piece of useless information I'm storing. Maybe, but I also know that she reads the last page of a book before she decides to read the first. I know that she likes the smell of new crayons. That she can whistle through her fingers and detests curry and has never had a cavity. Life is not a plot; it's in the details.

I reach out to touch Delia's face. “We're not going to talk about what happened yesterday, are we,” I ask softly.

She shakes her head. “We're not going to talk about this either,” she says, and she leans forward by degrees, giving me the chance to back away before the kiss settles.

When we break apart, I feel like I'm on a window ledge, dizzy and certain that every move I make will be the wrong one. I can't find a single word that won't feel like glass in my mouth. “You have to go,” I tell her. Just before Delia reaches the door, she turns. In her arms she still clutches the last batch of pages I've written. “I want to know how it ends,” she says. VIII

A liar should have a good memory.

–Quintilian, Institutions Oratoriae, iv. 2, 91

Delia

I remember walking the gray halls of Wexton High: Eric and I pretzeled with our hands in each other's back jean pockets, Fitz spouting off beside us about everything from what words had been admitted to the Webster's Dictionary to why even a blue lobster, if you boil it, turns red. I would nod at all the right places but I didn't really listen to Fitz; I was more concerned with the notes Eric would slide through the breathing holes of my locker and what it felt like when his fingers slipped underneath the hem of my T-shirt to ride on the knots of my spine. And yet it turns out that I actually remember most of what Fitz said. I was paying attention even when I told myself I wasn't. If his voice hasn't been the melody of my life, it's been the bass line, so subtle you don't notice it until it's missing. I park in front of the trailer and let myself inside quietly. It is barely six in the morning; Eric and Sophie will still be asleep. I reach into the cabinet above the sink and take out the coffee grounds, start a fresh pot, and suddenly feel hands on my shoulders and a kiss on my cheek.

A kiss.

“You're up early,” Eric says.

He is dressed to the nines in a dark gray suit and a crimson tie, so striking with his dark hair and light eyes that it takes my breath away. “I was . . . having trouble sleeping,” I say. “I went out.” Is it lying if I do not tell him I've been gone the whole night, and he doesn't ask?

He sits down at the table, and I bring him some orange juice. But instead of taking a sip of it, he traces the yawning mouth of the glass. “Delia,” he says. “I'm going to do the best I can today.”

“I know that.”

“But I also wanted to say I'm sorry.”

My mind swirls with sentences I read last night in Fitz's writing. “For what?” Eric looks at me with so much unsaid that I expect the moment to crystallize, fall to the table like a marble. But he lifts his glass, breaking the spell. “Just in case,” he says.

Eric understands that the world is rarely the way it is supposed to be. And he knows that, given the chance, we don't have to wait for someone to make messes of our lives. We do a good enough job, ourselves.

Sophie thumps down the hallway, dragging one of her stuffed animals by its arm.

“You woke me up,” she accuses, but she crawls into Eric's lap, trusting one of the very people she's just blamed. She rubs her nose with the sleeve of her nightgown and leans against his lapel, still half-asleep.

We make messes of our lives, but every now and then, we manage to do something that's exactly right.

The challenge is figuring out which is which.

There is a playroom staffed by volunteers at the courthouse, a place where Sophie can crawl through tunnels and twist pipe cleaners while, upstairs, her grandfather stands trial for kidnapping. I drop her off with a promise to come back soon, and then head into the courtroom to take my seat.

I am waylaid by reporters, who corner me with their microphones: Have you reconciled with your mother, Delia? Have you maintained contact with your father? I shove past the hooks and claws of their questions and duck into the courtroom. Eric is already at the defense table, organizing files with Chris Hamilton, his second chair. There are more reporters queuing in the rear, artists with sketch pads. And leaning against the far wall is Fitz, his eyes locked on me. A side door opens and two bailiffs escort my father inside. He is wearing a suit again, but his face is pillowed and bruised, as if he has recently been in a fight. He is freshly shaved.

I used to love to watch my father shave. I had no mother to show me the wonders of blush and mascara; to me the mystery was watching the cream rise like a meringue in my father's palm, and then using it to paint the curve of his jaw. I'd make him put it on my cheeks, too. I'd pretend to shave beside him with a toothbrush. Then we would lean into the mirror together–my father checking for spots he had missed; and me, glancing from his eyes and jaw and lips to mine, trying to find all the matches.