Vanishing Acts Read online

  "Than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance," I finished.

  "Why is that written on your leg?"

  "Because," I said, "I ran out of room on my jacket."

  "You must be an English major."

  "English majors smoke clove cigarettes and say things like de-construction and onomatopoeia just to hear the sound of their voices."

  He started to laugh. "You're right. I used to date an English major. She was always looking at things like laundry in a dryer, or toast, and trying to relate them to the subtext of Paradise Lost."

  I knew men. My mother had taught me how to read the sentences they did not say out loud, how to wear a red cord tied around my left wrist to keep away the ones who only saw you as a single step, rather than a destination. I could tell by the bitter almond smell that rose off a man's skin whether he had cheated on his partners in the past. But the men I had known were like me--boys who had grown up dreaming in Spanish, boys who believed you could light a red candle for a dose of luck, boys who knew that a man who spoke ill of his girlfriend might find his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth when he awakened. Men like Charlie, on the other hand, went to universities and wrestled with mathematical theorems and combined chemicals to watch them rise in lovely clouds of invisible gas. Men like Charlie were not meant for girls like me.

  "If you're not an English major," he asked, "then what do you do?"

  I looked at him as if he were crazy--did he not see the four walls of this squat building around me? Did he think I was here because I liked the view? But I wanted him to know that there was more to me than just this job. I wanted him to think I was mysterious and different and anyone except the person I really was: a Mexican girl who did not live in the same world as people like him. So I took my deck of cards out from beneath the counter. "I read los naipes."

  "Tarot?" he said. "I don't buy that stuff."

  "Then you have nothing to lose." I opened the wooden box that held my deck and removed them, as usual, with my left hand. Then I said an Ave, and looked up at him. "Don't you want to know if you'll get your wish?"

  "What wish?"

  "That," I told him, "is up to you."

  He smiled so slowly that I had to look down. "All right then. Tell me my future."

  I had him cut the deck three times, for the Holy Trinity, and hand them back to me. Then I laid out nine cards: four in the shape of the Cross, five and six balanced below the arms of it, seven at the base, eight tipped on its side at the very bottom, and the last card smack in the center of them all. "The first card," I said, turning it over, "shows your state of mind." It was the Seven of Wands.

  "God, I hope it means money. Especially if it's my engine that's dead."

  "It's a message," I told him. "It says that the truth can't stay hidden forever. These next three cards will tell you who's going to help you figure it out."

  I flipped them over. "This is interesting. The Lovers, well, that's just what you'd think--a happy couple. Some sort of romantic relationship is going to be instrumental in helping you get what you want. The Strength card isn't as good as it sounds--it tells you not to take on more than you can handle. But I think that the Chariot cancels that out, because it's powerful, and means you're going to ultimately have good luck."

  I turned over cards five and six. "The Eight of Wands is a warning against ugly actions that might destroy you ... and this card, the Hanged Man ... have you been committing any crimes lately? Because that's usually what this represents--someone who better mend his ways, or God will get him even if the law doesn't."

  "I jaywalked yesterday," Charlie said.

  Cards seven and eight were the enemies plotting against him. "These are both great cards," I said. "This is a child who's important to you, and who brings balance to your life."

  "I don't really know any kids."

  "A brother or sister?" I asked. "No nieces, nephews?"

  "Not even a cousin."

  I started scrubbing down the bar, although it was perfectly clean. "Then maybe it's yours," I said. "Sometime."

  His hand crossed the wood, fingered the card. "What's she going to look like?"

  The suit was Cups. "Light-skinned and dark-haired."

  "Like you," he said.

  I blushed, and busied myself by turning over the last card. "This lets you know if your wish will come true, or if all those other things will get in the way."

  The card was the Seven of Cups--a wedding or alliance he would regret for the rest of his life. "So?" Charlie asked, and his voice rang with the future. "Do I get what I want?"

  "Absolutely," I lied, and then I leaned across the bar and kissed him over the map of our lives.

  I never forgot you.

  I have boxes, somewhere in the crawl space of the garage, full of the Christmas gifts and birthday presents you weren't here to open--stuffed animals and charm bracelets, sequined slippers and dress-up clothes that would have fit you way back when. Once Victor realized that I was still buying for you, he got upset--it wasn't healthy, he told me--and he made me promise I would stop. Not everyone understands how you can spin two lassos at the same time, one of hope and one of grief.

  When the elementary school you might have attended held its fifth-grade send-off, I went to the auditorium and listened to everyone else's children dream of what they might grow up to be: a pale-ontologist, a recording star, the first astronaut to walk on Mars. I imagined you wearing braids, although that would have been too babyish a style for you by then. I celebrated your sweet sixteen at the Biltmore, where I made the penguin-breasted waiter serve tea for two, although you were not sitting across from me.

  I never stopped hoping that you'd come home, but I did stop expecting it. Having your breath freeze up every time the doorbell chimes or the phone rings takes its toll on a person, and whether it is conscious or not, you eventually make the decision to divide your life in half--before and after--with loss being that tight bubble in the middle. You can move around in spite of it; you can laugh and smile and carry on with your life, but all it takes is one slow range of motion, a doubling over, to be fully aware of the empty space at your center.

  When you love someone more than he loves you, you'll do anything to switch the scales. You dress the way you think he'd like you to dress. You pick up his favorite figures of expression. You tell yourself that if you re-create yourself in his image, then he will crave you the same way you crave him.

  Maybe you understand what happened between me and Charlie better than anyone else would--when you are told you're someone you aren't, over and over, you begin to believe it. You live that life. But you are wearing a mask, one that might slip if you aren't careful. You wonder what he will do when he finds out. You know you are bound to disappoint him.

  There was a moment, I admit, where I thought I had made him love me as much as I needed him to. When you were about eighteen months old, I got pregnant again. Charlie would sneak out of work during his lunch break and come home to me; he'd rest his head on my belly. Matthew Matthews, he'd say, trying names on for size to make me laugh. Banjo. Sprocket. No, Cortisone. Cort for short. He'd bring me little gifts from the pharmacy: chocolate candy bars, cocoa butter, butterfly hair clips.

  I was twenty-one weeks along when my membranes ruptured. The baby was perfect--a little boy, the size of a human heart. I developed an infection; started bleeding. I was taken back to the OR, and given a hysterectomy. The doctors used words like uterine atony and artery ligation, disseminated intravascular coagulation, but all I heard was that I couldn't have any more children. I knew, even if no one was willing to say it to me, that this had been my fault, some fatal flaw in me. And when I came home from the hospital, I realized that Charlie knew this, too. He couldn't stand to look at me. He spent more and more time in the office. He took you with him.

  I drank a lot before I met your father, but I honestly think it took that miscarriage to make me an alcoholic. I drank until I didn't see the regret in Charlie's eyes. I drank until ev