Vanishing Acts Read online

  My father is the last prisoner to be brought in. He is wearing striped scrubs, just like you'd see in a cartoon, and for the first time this becomes real to me. He is not going to step forward and pull off the costume, tell me this has all been a bad dream; it is really happening; it is now my life. My hand comes up to my mouth, and I know he can't hear me draw in my breath like I'm drowning, but he touches the glass between us all the same, as if it might still be that simple to reach me.

  He picks up the phone and mimes for me to do the same. "Delia," he says, his voice hammered thin. "Delia, baby, I'm sorry."

  I've told myself that I won't cry, but before I know it, I'm doubled over on the tiny stool, sobbing so hard that my chest hurts. I want him to reach through the glass like the magician I used to think he was and tell me this is all just a misunderstanding. I want to believe whatever it is he has to say.

  "Don't cry," he begs.

  I wipe my eyes. "Why didn't you tell me?"

  "You were too little, at first. And then, when you were older, I was too selfish." He hesitates. "You used to look at me like I was a hero. And I didn't think I could stand it if you stopped looking at me like that."

  I lean closer to the wall between us. "Then tell me now," I insist. "Tell me the truth."

  Suddenly I remember being very small, and dumping all the pairs of tights I owned on my father's bed, a twisted ball of cabled blue and white snakes. I hate wearing these, I said to him. They always wind up bunched at my knees, and make it so that at recess, I can't run.

  I thought he would protest, and tell me that I'd wear whatever was in my drawers and that was that. But instead he started to laugh. You can't run? Well, we can't have that, can we?

  "We named you Bethany. You were so small when you were born--tinier even than a loaf of bread. I used a filing cabinet as a crib for you, when I took you to work with me." He looks up at me. "I used to be a pharmacist."

  A pharmacist? I scramble back over my memory, trying to find red flags I missed the first time around: my father's quick knowledge of the dosage of Baby Tylenol for Sophie's weight; his frustration when I couldn't understand high school chemistry. Why didn't he practice in New Hampshire, I wonder ... and then I answer my own question: because he was licensed under another name, someone who disappeared off the face of the earth.

  If you call yourself something different, does it change the person you are inside? "Who were you?"

  "Charles," he says. "Charles Edward Matthews."

  "Three first names."

  He startles. "That's exactly what your mother said when we met."

  I draw in my breath when he mentions her. "What was her real name?"

  "Elise. I didn't lie to you about that."

  "No," I say. "Except instead of telling me you got divorced, you said she was dead."

  Let me tell you what happens when you cook down the syrup of loss over the open fire of sorrow: It solidifies into something else. Not grief, like you'd expect, or even regret. No, it gets thick as paste, black as ash; yet it isn't until you dip a finger in and feel that sharp taste dissolving on your tongue that you realize this is anger in its purest form, unrefined; a substance to be weighed and measured and spread.

  I had come here, or so I thought, to make sure my father was all right, to show him that I was all right, too. I had come here to tell him that in spite of what the police had to say, in spite of what happened in court, I was not going to forget the childhood he'd given me. But suddenly, the scales don't balance, and those twenty-eight years I thought I knew are outweighed by the four I never had the chance to. "Why?" I ask, the word clenched between my teeth. "Why did you do it?"

  My father shakes his head. "I didn't want you to get hurt. Not then, Delia ... and not now--"

  "Don't call me that!" I am so loud that in the booth beside us, a woman turns around.

  "I didn't have a choice."

  My heart is pounding, and I cannot stop. "You had a choice. You had a thousand choices. To leave or not to leave. To take me with you, or not. To tell me the truth when I was five years old, or ten, or twenty. I was the one without the choice, Dad."

  I hurry out of the visiting room, so that he can feel what it's like to be the one left behind.

  *

  By the time I get back to the pink trailer, everyone's asleep. Sophie is on the couch, curled like a question mark around Greta, who opens one eye and thumps her tail at the sight of me. I kneel down and touch Sophie's brow; she's sweating.

  A month after she was born, I bundled her up in her winter snowsuit in preparation for a trip to the grocery store, and buckled her into the infant carrier that snaps into a car seat. I left the carrier on top of the kitchen table while I put on my own coat and boots. I was halfway to the grocery store, driving on the highway, when my cell phone rang. It was my father calling. "Missing something?" he asked. When I glanced in the rearview mirror, I realized that I'd never taken Sophie, in her infant carrier, out to the car. I'd left her on the kitchen table, strapped into the little half-moon seat.

  I couldn't believe I'd left behind my own infant. I couldn't believe I hadn't felt off balance, as if I were missing an arm or a leg, since she was just as critical a part of me. Mortified, I told my father I'd come straight home. "Just go to the store," he'd said, laughing. "She's safe with me."

  Broad hands slide under the front of my T-shirt, and I twist around to find Eric, still warm with sleep. He pulls me into the bedroom at the end of the trailer and closes the door. "Did you see him?" he whispers.

  I nod.

  "So?"

  "I had to talk to him through a glass booth ... and he's wearing black-and-white stripes like some kind of ... some kind of ..."

  "Criminal?" Eric says softly, and that's all it takes for me to start to cry again. He wraps his arms around me, lowering me onto the bed.

  "He's in there because of me," I say. "And I don't even really know who that is anymore."

  Eric's body moves behind mine, one leg sliding warm between my own. He settles over me like fog, tracing the seam of me with his tongue. "I do," he says.

  In my dream, I've been hiding. The kitchen floor glitters; it is covered with diamonds that I know are broken glass. There are shattered plates on the floor; the cabinets are wide open, with no mugs or dishes left inside.

  There's yelling, almost as loud as the sound of glass breaking.

  I can hear it, even after my hands are pressed tight over my ears. It sounds like the inside of a drum, like the dragon that's really my breathing, like the hard knot of tears in my throat that keeps me from swallowing.

  I am aware, first, of the sun rising underneath the covers. Then comes the breath, heavy and wet as sand at the bottom of the sea. I sit up in an instant and throw back the sheet to find Sophie huddled in a small knot, raging with a fever.

  I call for Eric, but he's gone; he has left me a note with the number of his friend's law offices. I can nearly hear my daughter's blood boiling. I ransack my luggage for a thermometer or aspirin or anything that might help, and when I come up empty-handed I carry her into the pink bathroom and stand in the tepid shower with her in my arms.

  Sophie rolls her flushed face toward me, her eyes blind and blue. "There's a monster in the potty," she says.

  I glance into the toilet, where a small dark feather is floating. I flush it, twice. "There," I say. "Gone." But by now, Sophie's head lolls back; she is out cold.

  In the bathroom there are no towels; I wrap Sophie in the shirt Eric discarded when he came home yesterday. Her teeth are chattering, her forehead blazes. She whimpers as I try to swaddle her tightly, and then hurry out the front door.

  It is only eight in the morning, but I kick at Ruthann Masawistiwa's door, still holding Sophie in my arms. "Please," I beg, when she opens it. "I need to find a hospital."

  She takes one look at Sophie. "Follow me," she says, but instead of heading for my car, she walks into our trailer. She leans out the window that I opened last night for the fresh