Vanishing Acts Read online

  Elise has shiny dark hair twisted into a knot at the base of her neck, and a fine graph of lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth. She is wearing a peasant shirt embroidered with colorful birds, and jeans covered with Sharpie-marker lines of text. My eyes focus on one: Oh daughter of ashes and mother of blood.

  "Sandburg," I murmur.

  Elise looks up at me, impressed. "Not many people read poetry these days."

  "Fitz is a writer," Delia says.

  "Actually, I'm a hack for a second-rate paper."

  Elise traces the phrase on her jeans. "I always thought it would be wonderful to be a writer," she says. "To know, just like that, how to put the right words together."

  I smile politely. The truth is, if I do miraculously manage to put the right words together, it's by default, because I've already used up all the wrong ones. And when you get right down to it, what I don't say is probably more important than what I do.

  Then again, maybe Elise Vasquez already knows this.

  She stares out the sliding glass door into the backyard, where Victor has taken Sophie to see a bird's nest, where the eggs are hatching. He lifts her up so she can get a closer look, and then they disappear behind a wall of cacti.

  "Thank you," Elise says, "for bringing her."

  Delia turns to her. "I won't keep you from seeing Sophie."

  Elise glances at me uncomfortably.

  "He's my best friend," Delia says. "He knows about all of it."

  Just then Sophie comes running back inside. "It's so cool ... they have teeth on their beaks," she says breathlessly. "Can we stay until they're out?"

  Sophie tugs on Delia's hand, until she stands up. In the doorway, Victor chuckles. "I tried to explain that it might take a while," he says.

  Delia answers him, but she is looking at her mother. "That's all right," she says. "I don't mind waiting." She lets Sophie pull her outside, toward the tree.

  Elise Vasquez and I stand shoulder to shoulder, watching the woman we both feel we lost, and maybe never really had.

  On the way home, we stop for coffee. Sophie squats on the sidewalk at the cafe, drawing a crime-scene outline around Greta with colored chalk. Delia drums her fingers on the edge of her cup but doesn't seem to be inclined to drink anything from it. "Can you picture them together?" she asks finally, when the wheels of her mind have stopped turning.

  "Elise and Victor?"

  "No," Delia says. "Elise and my father."

  "Dee, no one can ever imagine their parents doing it."

  Take mine, for example. The sad fact is, my parents didn't do it. They managed to have me, of course, but most of the time I was growing up, my salesman father was off screwing a flight attendant in another city, and my mother was furiously busy pretending he wasn't.

  But my father was not Andrew Hopkins. In all the years I've known Delia, I can't remember him dating anyone seriously, so I can't even fathom what he'd look for in a woman. If you asked me, though, I'd never have imagined him falling for someone like Elise. She reminds me of an orchid, exotic and fragile. Andrew is more like ragweed: stealthy, resilient, stronger than you think.

  I look at the comma curve of Delia's neck, at the bony points of her shoulder blades, a terrain that has been mapped by Eric. "Some people aren't meant to be together," I say.

  Suddenly a ragged man wearing a hairnet and flip-flops walks toward us, holding a stack of pamphlets. Sophie, scared, hides behind her mother's chair. "My brother," the vagrant asks me, "have you found the Lord Jesus Christ?"

  "I didn't know he was looking for me."

  "Is He your personal savior?"

  "You know," I say, "I'm still kind of hoping to rescue myself."

  The man shakes his head, dreadlocks like snakes. "None of us are strong enough for that," he replies, and moves on.

  "I think that's illegal," I mutter to Delia. "Or at least it should be. Nobody should have to swallow religion with their coffee."

  When I look up, she's staring at me. "How come you don't believe in God?" Delia asks.

  "How come you do?"

  She looks down at Sophie, and her whole face softens. "I guess it's because some things are too incredible for people to take all the credit."

  Or the blame, I think.

  Two tables over, the zealot approaches an elderly couple. "Believe in the Father," he preaches.

  Delia turns in his direction. "It's never that simple," she says.

  When Delia was pregnant with Sophie, I was the labor coach. I sort of fell into it by default, when Eric, who had promised that he wouldn't fuck up this time, wound up drying out just about the time Lamaze classes started. I found myself sitting in a circle of married couples, trying not to let my heart race as the nurse instructed me to settle Delia between my legs and trace my hands over the swell of her belly.

  Delia went into labor in the middle of the frozen foods aisle at Shaw's market, and she phoned me from the manager's office. By the time we got to the hospital, I had worked myself into a near panic about how I would be able to do whatever it was that I was supposed to do as a labor coach, without having to look between her legs. Maybe I could request a position at her shoulders. Maybe I could pull the doctor aside and explain the logistics of the situation.

  As it happened, I didn't have to worry about that at all. The minute the anesthesiologist rolled Delia onto her hip to insert the epidural, I took one look at the needle, passed out, and wound up with sixty stitches at my hairline.

  I awakened on a cot next to her. "Hey, Cowboy," she said, smiling over the tiny peach of a head that poked out from the blanket in her arms. "Thanks for all the help."

  "Don't mention it," I said, wincing as my scalp throbbed.

  "Sixty stitches," Delia explained, and then she added, "I only had ten."

  I found myself looking at her head. "Not there," she said, giving me a moment to figure it out. "You're not going to pass out again, are you?"

  I didn't. Instead, I managed to lurch to the edge of Delia's hospital bed, so that I could take a look at the baby. I remember looking into the fuzzy blue of Sophie's eyes and marveling at the fact that there was now one other person in this world who understood what it was like to be completely surrounded by Delia, who'd already learned that it couldn't stay that way.

  I had Sophie in my arms when Eric came in. He went straight to Delia and kissed her on the mouth, then bent his forehead against hers for a moment, as if whatever he was thinking might be transferred by osmosis. Then Eric turned, his eyes locking on his daughter. "You can hold her," Delia prompted.

  But Eric didn't make any move to take Sophie from me. I took a step toward him, and saw what Delia must have overlooked--Eric's hands were shaking so hard that he had buried them in his coat pockets.

  I pushed the baby against his chest, so that he'd have no choice but to grab hold. "It's okay," I said under my breath--To Eric? To Sophie? To myself?--and as I transferred this tiny prize to Eric's arms, I held on longer than I had to. I made damn sure he was steady, before I let go.

  I have seventeen messages, all from my editor. The first starts by asking me to call her back. By the third, Marge is demanding it. Message eleven reminds me that if monkeys can be sent into space, they can certainly be trained to write for the New Hampshire Gazette.

  In the last voice mail, Marge tells me that if I don't have something on her desk by nine A.M., she is going to fill my page space with the Xeroxes of my ass that I took at the office Christmas party.

  So I pull down the shades in the motel. I turn up the TV, to drown out the moans of a couple one thin wall away from me. I crank up the air-conditioning. Andrew Hopkins, I type, is not what you expect when you walk through the corridors of the Madison Street Jail.

  I shake my head and hit the delete button, erasing the paragraph.

  Like any father, all Andrew Hopkins wants to talk about is his daughter.

  That sentence, I backspace into oblivion.

  Andrew Hopkins has ghosts in his eyes, I write