Читать книгу When We Disappear - Lise Haines - Страница 6

I wrote something out to Liz at the kitchen table so she wouldn’t worry, and left half the money I’d gotten from the ATM. I slipped my car key off the ring. I knew Mona needed to sleep and Liz would insist she get up to say goodbye, and that would stir some new rancor I’d have to carry with me to Newark. Lola, who was the soundest sleeper, would be a sack of potatoes in Liz’s arms.

So I went back upstairs and instead of waking her I watched Liz in the circle of closet light. She was curled up with one hand tucked around her right breast, her hair spread along my pillow. This was the picture I would take with me, always wishing to crawl back into that one particular moment. I shut off the alarm.

Lola was in the little-girl bed I had assembled that week, out of her crib now in her own room. I stroked her hair and watched her breathe. I worried that she would grow too quickly while I was gone.

Downstairs again, I put my palm against Mona’s door and thought about turning the handle. Mona is a sleepwalker. She has a way of finding disturbances in nights the rest of us find calm. Maybe you could say that about the daytime too. With any luck she’d forgotten to set her alarm, consciously or unconsciously, the way she sometimes did, counting on Liz to wake her. I thought it best to let her be.

That morning became the coin toss. Daily I’ve wondered if waking my family up before taking off would have landed us differently.

With the suitcase in the car, I hoped to make it to New Jersey without spending a night in a motel. I had a blanket and pillow in the back if I needed to pull into a truck or rest stop. I let the handbrake out, and the car rolled down the drive.

I made good time all the way to Pennsylvania. The weather held, but the highway gradually filled with semis. I looked at pictures of donuts and office supplies and sweating Coke bottles on side panels for miles. It became harder to pass them, and then if I did, it was only to get wedged into another cluster of giant trucks. Reaching a rest stop, I grabbed a coffee and studied the Pennsylvania map, deciding on a rural route for the next leg.

I was fifteen minutes out on that two-lane highway when I saw a great plume of smoke—a cloud so long and thick it arced across the sky. Later I would try to tell Lola over the phone that it was like watching the tail of a giant cat. The smoke came from a tire graveyard set on fire, the rubber bedded down in gullies, pushed up ridges and thrown down over every slope. My windows were up, but the car filled with the stench.

A woman stood by her car on the shoulder making big, sweeping motions with her arms, appearing and disappearing in the smoke. I didn’t want to lose time, but I had stopped many times with Uncle Sor to help a stranger when we were on the road together. It’s what you do. Pulling ahead of her, I parked and got out and walked back to her car. She was midway between Mona’s age and Liz’s. She had a beautiful face torn up by acne and some kind of trouble. Her hair looked as if a fury had driven it straight into the air. There was a message on her T-shirt, but I didn’t want to stare at her chest. The backseat and the passenger side of her car were full. A small dog carrier sat on a pile of magazines in the front seat. I looked to see if there was a flat, but her tires were fine. “I have a few tools in my trunk,” I offered.

“The engine light wouldn’t go off, and I thought I had another can of oil. My sister lives a few towns over. Give me a lift?”

“Sure,” I said without asking which way over.

“I think someone can come back and tow it. Let me grab some stuff. I’m Linda, by the way.”

“Richard. You want to call them? I have a phone,” I said.

She fished hers out of her jeans and held it up, saying, “I think they do better with surprises. All I need is to get turned down because they have to think about it.” That’s when I read the message on her T-shirt: Hold your own … if you go limp.

I thought Linda would just take a suitcase and the dog with its small, rhythmic yips. But she kept moving through that coil of black smoke to get more, and I kept helping. “I heard it’s been burning for days,” she said, looking out to the hills. I set the crate in the footwell behind my seat.

There was a toaster oven, three sets of hot rollers, and framed posters of drag race cars. She wanted the magazines. I pulled my collar up and tried to breathe through my shirt when my hands weren’t full. Finally we were back on the road. “It’s a straight shot,” she said.

A fine rain began and picked up pace, but that did nothing to the reek of burning rubber.

She said, “You ever been betrayed?”

I figured she mostly wanted to talk about herself. So I said, “You?”

“By my own son. The older they get, the more they think they know, right? Snooping in your drawers, your pockets, listening in on phone lines, seeing what they can pry loose like they want to know who you really are when all they’re up to is finding a way to get back at you about one thing or another. I was sure my son was out with his friends when I was on the phone, you know, breaking it off with this man. It ripped me pretty bad because I thought we might have had a chance in this sick world, but I told him I was staying with my husband for my son’s sake. I was going to keep putting up with the drinking and the hunting even when it wasn’t the season and his damn meth cooking in the basement like I’m supposed to spend my nights waiting to blow up while I’m making supper. Anyway, my son came up to the kitchen just then and pulled the phone from my grip and hung up the receiver. He said he was going to tell Willis, that’s my husband, his father, when Willis got home from the gun show. So I just loaded up the car. No reason I should get a beating for staying loyal, you know? I’ve been beat enough.”

A loopy kind of fatigue took over as I watched the wipers clear a path through the rain. I hoped Linda would keep me alert with her stories over that stretch of green hills dotted with cows and farm equipment.

When I felt she was waiting for some type of response, I said, “So you’re saying kids have no respect?”

Under the quiet tones of a talk radio station I had forgotten to silence she said, “You making fun of me?”

“No, I just … I think you’re right. The older they get, the more damage they can do.”

She didn’t say anything to this, and I couldn’t help but think about Mona. I often wondered how much she knew at seventeen, what things she recalled and what things she had decided to let go of. She was in her own world most of the time, but that didn’t mean she didn’t surface when she wanted to. And though I always asked, half the time I didn’t really know where she went at night even when she told me, or who she was dating, or what she spent her time photographing. She didn’t show me the way she showed her mother.

Liz subscribed to this psychology magazine, and she once read aloud to me from an article on secrets. It said that keeping family secrets is as common as getting up in the morning. I asked Liz what she thought, and I was surprised when she dropped the magazine by the bed and said, “I think telling secrets, well, some secrets anyway, can be more harmful than holding on to them.” I didn’t say anything, and right after that she shut off the light and we went to bed, much as I couldn’t sleep thinking about this idea.

“You imagine you’ll go back?” I asked Linda. “When things calm down?”

“You must be crazy,” she said. Then she released her seatbelt and shifted things around and got her dog out of the carrier. He was a scrawny, trembling thing without much hair, and she placed him under her sweater, right over her belly, where he settled. She called someone on her phone and said she was a couple of miles away and to meet her at the diner.

When we pulled into the parking lot, there was a man idling in a pickup painted flat black, with rims the size of Pennsylvania. He was smoking a joint and just sat there, not helping, while she and I loaded her stuff onto the bed in the rain. I didn’t know if this was a brother-in-law or her boyfriend or what. She didn’t make any introductions. When we were done we covered her wet things with a blue plastic tarp he had up in the cab. But as soon as they pulled away the tarp flew up into the air and landed in the lot, and they didn’t bother to circle around to get it.

I stood there in that desolate country, the rain coming down, wondering how I was going to put things right with Mona. I wished in that moment that my Uncle Sorohan was around. No one had a better sense about people than he did and what kind of secrets it’s best to keep. I didn’t know how long Mona would keep hers.

Uncle Sorohan was a professional guesser on the carnival circuit and that meant he could tell your age within two years, your weight within three pounds, your birthday within two months. If he guessed wrong, he handed you a prize. But he rarely guessed wrong. He told me once I would wander. I never imagined this would be away from Liz and the girls.

Sor hired me to help out the summer I turned sixteen. Guessing had him on the road from one end of the country to the other, early spring to late fall in an old Chevy, and he said he liked having someone along. The Chevy pulled an Airstream with a special rig off the back that hauled a giant scale. He always got us to the next show before the break of day, nursing a flask.

The first time I saw his booth in a midway, it looked like a cartoon with question marks dancing at its edges. It was painted red and yellow, and it looked as bright as a burning city. Centered at the top was a sign that read, Fool the Guesser. Stuffed animals hung in clusters and were perched on shelves at the back. The Howe industrial scale verified his accuracy. “You have to know who’s going to put their money down,” he told me, “and who’s going to be a repeat customer, and who’s going to grab their friends and bring them back here thinking they’ll cheat you.”

In mid-July, after being on the road for six weeks, we stopped outside Chicago, a few towns over from where my family lived. It was one of the bigger carnivals where we had a weeklong stint. I didn’t even tell my parents we were in town, I was so happy to have my freedom. Sor let me try my hand at guesswork but I kept handing out prizes. Finally he said, “Guessing someone’s age within two years means two years on either side of the year they were born in, so you’re giving yourself a five-year span to work with. It’s not that hard.” Once that sank in and I discovered where he hid the flask, I began to relax.

He helped me understand bone mass: how a lump of fat in the upper arms will tip the scale, something about weight lifters and their light heads. He showed me how to assess pockets filled with keys and wallets and how a pair of work boots can be loaded with steel. “Look for yellowed fingers and stained teeth,” he said, pointing out particular lines in a face to show me the way a smoker could throw me off on age and how heavy coffee drinkers lose water weight and get a sunken look in their cheeks.

I thought birthdays were the toughest, but he said, “In time you’ll start to see the sunny disposition of the summer baby, the spectral look of the autumn born, the rapid talker of spring, the perennial sadness of winter’s child. I have books on Chinese face reading, body language, palmistry, and clothes psychology and fabric composition. You’re welcome to borrow any of them.”

His favorite author was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and each night he read one of Sherlock’s adventures aloud to me from his bed as if I were a young boy. He slept on two facing couches that pulled together in the trailer, and Sor’s deep voice drifted over to the nose of the Airstream, where I bunked. He had a fedora he never took off, even when he slept.

“You’ll just know. You won’t have to think about guessing after a while. I’ll admit there’s a letdown to seeing what’s behind the curtain, Richard, but you’ll get over that and find other kinds of letdowns waiting for you,” he said, and then he laughed.

While most people who came to that carnival outside Chicago thought he was paying a quick compliment and taking their tickets, he was reading them to their cerebellums. One day as two girls were eyeing the booth he nudged me and said, “Your turn.”

They were about my age and one had a high laugh, a smile that showed her full gums, and a body as thin and light as smoke.

The other was the beauty with true brown hair pulled into a ponytail. She wore a short skirt with a tank top and gym shoes. She didn’t use a lot of makeup and had a way of sizing up every last thing around her. When her eyes mirrored the streaming, flashing lights of the park, she made all the other carnival goers who had come from the city look dull and habitual.

She was holding a paper dish with a sugary lump of fried dough when I blocked her path. “I can guess your weight within two pounds,” I said.

“Before or after I eat this fried dough?” she said, staring me down.

“Both,” I said.

“But can you tell the hour of my birth?” she said, looking smugly at her friend.

“If you tell me your name,” I said.

Sor coughed to let me know I was heading out on a fragile limb. The friend tugged at her arm, eager to push on. But the beauty laughed and said, “Elizabeth. Don’t forget to include the time zone.”

I knew from taking tests in school that it was better to fill something in than leave it as blank as my mind was at that moment. And I knew from Uncle Sor not to overthink things and that sharp-minded types are often born in the late hours of the evening or early morning.

“Eleven thirty-three p.m. Central Time,” I said. “If I’m wrong, I’ll hand you a prize.” Her friend gave me a sour look. “I’ll give you two prizes,” I said, and Sor spit on the ground.

Elizabeth knit her eyebrows together, and then something seemed to change and she looked at me with a kind of wonder I wish I had a photograph of and said, “Aren’t you clever? Only off by a minute. Eleven thirty-four.”

I wanted to ask if I was really all that close when she said, “If you guess my phone number next time, I’ll let you take me out.” And then she and her shadow were off in the direction of the Tilt-A-Whirl.

“She’ll be back tomorrow without her friend,” Uncle Sor said. “Make the most of it. We leave in two days. And before you ask, no, that’s not her real birth time. She’s more like two in the morning. Maybe a painter. I’d say ceramicist, but her hands weren’t dry.”

That was a Friday and we were folding up Sunday night. I sat by the front of the booth on a stool all Saturday and waited. I looked at every face that went by. I didn’t wander off to get lunch and I skipped dinner until Sor brought me some. I doubt I peed all day. By late Sunday afternoon I decided my uncle was crazy and I had been an idiot. I considered leaving him halfway through the season to head home and face the regimented life my father was pushing. He wanted me to follow in his bootsteps and become a cop.

Just after the evening lights came up and the music whirred louder, Elizabeth walked up to the booth in a blue dress with her hair halfway down her back. She didn’t make me stand around guessing. Instead, she let me take her on all the rides. We had swallows from my uncle’s flask and we made out behind the haunted house. She told me she was going to study art in college.

I was thick with love as I unrigged the Chevy that pulled the trailer and drove her home. We stopped five times to make out along the way. Just before we got to her house she made me pull over and handed me a slip of paper and opened the car door and ran down the block. In the light from the radio I saw that she had written out her name and phone number with instructions on when not to call so her parents wouldn’t interfere.

My uncle looked over at me as I folded and unfolded that paper late that night. We were in the car, hauling the trailer and the scale and my lame heart down the highway. He reached over and handed me a stuffed animal from one of the open boxes in the backseat and said, “She took her sweet time showing up, so I was off by a day. But I always pay up.”

I worried that she’d pick me up and put me down. But she found ways to see me until we graduated, and I began to gain confidence in us. Eventually we made it into the same state college. She was accepted into other schools, better schools, but exerted her will so that we would be together.

When she became pregnant with Mona, I dropped out. That was our junior year. We went through some tough days, her mother crying on the other end of the phone, family members on both sides convinced we had screwed up badly. I told them Liz was going to stay in school no matter what and she would go on to graduate school because there was something godlike in the way she could sculpt.

I learned to take any kind of work I could get, stocking shelves in grocery stores, hauling drywall around, wiping down cars at the carwash, hosing out port-a-potties. But for all my efforts, I wasn’t earning enough to support a family of three. I was sitting out on the back porch of our tiny apartment one night in the miserable summer air, halfway through a pint, when Liz called me into the bedroom.

She was naked and six months pregnant. Our fan was broken in the corner. She asked me to get undressed and lie down beside her on the bed. I thought she wanted me to make love to her and I felt the whiskey travel to my groin. But she said, “Wait. I have to talk with you.”

And like most things where Liz was concerned, I went along. She asked me to close my eyes. “Lie still,” she said. So I did.

I broke into a sweat and she blew lightly on my face. “Now I want you to think about the things you know how to do best in all the world—no matter how small.”

I laughed, and she said, “No, that will be your reward. Now clear your mind. Let things just drift through.”

“I can change the oil in the car.”

“Okay,” she said earnestly. “What else?”

“I’m still pretty good at math. Percentages.”

“Keep going.”

“Map reading,” I said. “I’ve always been good with maps.”

“Yes.”

“I think I’m a little drunk.”

“You’re not getting off that easy,” she said.

“I can … I can guess your weight within three pounds …”

“And my birthday within two months. So you can read people,” she said.

“I don’t know that I’ve read myself very well,” I said.

“Pity fest tomorrow. Stay on track.”

“I miss that old guy.”

“You said Sor taught you how to tell if someone was sick and if they had money and …”

“And if they’d lay that money down.”

“All right. Good with percentages and maps, able to read people and see if they’re sick or not. I don’t know about the oil change. But you can tell if they’re going to pay up. …”

I could see her mind racing. There was a long silence, and I’m afraid all I could think about were the little sounds she made when I drew into her.

“Insurance,” she finally said. “You could sell insurance. Quick, open your eyes.”

Before long her hair was falling around my face, her swollen belly moving back and forth over me, and I realized, in that way that I try and think of other things when she’s getting close, that she was right. It did seem like the kind of business where the more you could read someone, the richer your rewards.

Few things have come quick and easy in my life but twenty years later I was able to say we had a decent house in a pleasant neighborhood with a couple of fruit trees and a garage that we turned into Liz’s studio. She got all the way through graduate school, often with Mona on her hip. Her work showed periodically and a couple of the largest pieces sold—they were awfully big and expensive to make and move, so we were patient.

Our daughters, of course, were the real things. Lola was full of spunk from the start, walked early and could climb just about anything. She has her mother’s persistence, her eyes and her ruddy Irish skin. Mona made me think of a young Elizabeth Taylor when she was young, with intense dark eyes and hair. I’m afraid I’ve worried too much about our sleepwalker, though. And she only made it worse by staying up half the night talking with friends, but Liz told me I should leave her be, she’d grow out of it. She has her mother’s artistic nature, so maybe Liz read her in ways I couldn’t.

When I got laid off, I thought the world was over. I couldn’t find another spot anywhere. Employers wanted the younger guys. Suddenly I heard from an old friend who had been with the firm years back, a guy named Phil. Phil was the regional manager at a company on the East Coast now. We had known each other pretty well at one time and that meant he understood my record, my ethics, and what it is to support a family. He offered me a job in New Jersey.

Liz and I talked about it over several days. The plan was to let Mona finish out her year since she was a senior in high school. This would give Liz time to finish up a couple of her bigger projects and organize. Mona would go off to college and Liz and Lola would move to New Jersey. This would put Liz close to the New York market. She seemed ready to take this step.

Things made sense until I woke up that morning, the car packed for the trip.

When I think about that moment, I wonder what I was driving away from. I knew I was letting my family down, that I was all out of magic. Or I had the kind of magic that turns bad.