Vanishing Acts Read online

  Louise opens her hand so that the coins fall like rain. "Wouldn't you know it," she says, her mouth curving into a smile. "Now I work at a bank."

  *

  Sophie and I stand on the edge of Second Mesa, underneath the shadow of a circling hawk. "What it means," I explain, "is that Ruthann isn't here anymore."

  She looks up at me. "Is she where Grandpa is?"

  "No. Grandpa's going to come back," I say, although I don't know if this is true. "When you die, it means you go away, forever."

  "I don't want Ruthann to go away."

  "Me neither, Soph."

  Because I need to, I reach down and haul her into my arms. She wraps herself around me, her lips pressed to my ear. "Mommy," she says, "I want to go wherever you do."

  Had I said that once, to my mother?

  At the sound of footsteps behind us, I turn around. Fitz walks forward slowly, not sure whether it's all right to interrupt. "Thank you for coming," I say, and the words come out too stiff.

  "I owed you one," Fitz answers.

  I look down at the ground. He doesn't ask me what happened; he doesn't ask me why I've called him and not Eric. He knows, without me saying so, that I can't talk about that either yet. "I know I told you to go to hell," I say, "but I'm glad you ignored me."

  "Delia, that newspaper story--"

  "You know what?" I say, trying to keep my voice from breaking. "Right now, I don't need a journalist. But I sure could use a friend."

  He hunches his shoulders. "I have references."

  I offer up the smallest smile, a bridge between us. "Actually," I confess, "you're the only one who applied."

  We have just gotten into the car to drive back to Phoenix when the snow begins to fall, a freak act of nature. It starts as a few stray flurries, and then sticks to the ground. Dogs leap around, skidding trails with their paws; children come out of the houses edging the plaza to catch snowflakes on their tongues. Derek and Wilma, in the middle of the funeral preparations for Ruthann, stop what they are doing to look up at the sky. They will tell each other, and the people of Sipaulovi, that this is proof Ruthann has made it to the Spirit World.

  But I think this sign might also be for me. Because as Fitz drives away from Second Mesa toward Phoenix, the snow falls harder, blanketing the hood and the windshield and the mesas and the highway until the land is as white as the robe of a Hopi bride, as white as winter mornings in New Hampshire. As a child, I would stand at my window to see the folds of snow draped over my house and Eric's and Fitz's, like a sorcerer's scarf. It was easy to pretend that underneath, everything had disappeared--shrubs and brick paths and soccer balls, hedges and fences and property lines. It was easy to pretend that when the magician pulled away his kerchief, the world would start over from scratch.

  I don't think Fitz is at all surprised when I ask him to make a detour on our way home. He waits in the parking lot with Sophie and Greta, who are asleep in the backseat of the car. "Take your time," he says, as I walk into the jail.

  There is only one other inmate with a visitor. My father sits down on the other side of that wall of Plexiglas and picks up the phone. "Is everything all right?"

  I look at him in his stripes, with a bandage wrapped around his left hand and a healing cut on his temple, with a nervous tremor that makes him keep glancing to the side, to see if someone is coming up behind him, and I cannot believe that he is asking me that question.

  "Oh, Daddy," I say, all the tears coming at once.

  He balls his hand into a fist and then, from the core of it, pulls a plume of a Kleenex--sleight of hand. But then he remembers that he can't get the tissue to me through the barrier of the wall, or over the telephone connection. He smiles faintly. "Guess I haven't learned that trick yet."

  When we did our magic show for the seniors, my father had had to convince me to do the vanishing act. He explained the reality to me--out of sight is out of mind--but I still believed that once the black curtain came down, I'd be gone for good. I was so nervous that he cut the tiniest of holes in the curtain for me. If I could keep an eye on him, he said, then surely I wouldn't really disappear.

  I had forgotten about that hole until just now. It makes me wonder if I had remembered, even unconsciously, the way we had run away from home. If even at six years old, I had to learn to trust him to bring me back.

  Maybe if it hadn't been such an awful day, I would have noticed that on the ride home from the jail, Fitz has gotten quieter and quieter. But I've been thinking of Ruthann, and my father. It isn't until we pull up to the trailer and I see Eric's car outside that I panic. Two days ago, which feels more like two hundred, I had left him behind in the hospital, angry at him for doing the job I had asked him to do. "Come in," I beg Fitz, turning to him like I always do for support. "Be a buffer."

  "I can't."

  "Pretty please," I say. I glance into the backseat, where Sophie is still snoring in little puffs beside the dog. "You can carry her in."

  Fitz looks at me, his face expressionless. "No. I'm busy."

  "Doing what?"

  When he rounds on me, angry, it is so unlike the Fitz I know that I find myself shrinking back against the passenger seat. "For God's sake, Delia, I just drove six hundred miles for you, and you weren't even technically speaking to me."

  Heat rises to my cheeks. "I'm sorry. I thought ..."

  "What? That I have nothing better to do? That I don't have a life? That I might not spend all that time with you wishing I was doing this?" His hands lock on each side of my face and he pulls me forward, like gravity. When his mouth seals over mine it is brutal, bitter. The stubble of beard on his face leaves a mark on my skin, raw and shaped like regret.

  He isn't Eric, and so our lips don't move in a familiar rhythm. He isn't Eric, and so our teeth grit against each other. He holds the back of my head, as if he is afraid I will break away. My heart beats so hard I begin to feel it in forgotten places: behind my eyes, at the base of my throat, between my legs.

  "Mommy?"

  Fitz immediately releases me, and we both turn around to see Sophie watching us curiously from her car seat. "Oh, Jesus," he murmurs.

  "Sophie, honey," I say quickly, "you're having a dream." I fumble for the door latch and step out of the car, then reach into the back and haul my daughter into my arms. "Isn't it funny, the things we think we see when we're sleeping?"

  She sinks into my shoulder, boneless, as Greta bounds out of the car. By now, Fitz is standing outside, too. "Delia--"

  A light goes on in the trailer, and the door opens. Eric, bare-chested and wearing boxers, comes down the aluminum stairs. He takes Sophie out of my arms, a transaction of commerce.

  Before we can say anything to each other, the sound of Fitz's car engine slices the night in half. He peels away, leaving a cloud of dust and grit in his wake.

  "Ruthann's sister called to see if you got home," Eric says quietly, so that he doesn't wake Sophie. "She told me what happened." I follow him up the steps, wait to answer until he has laid Sophie down in our bed and pulled up the covers. He closes the door to the tiny bedroom and then puts his hands on my shoulders. "You all right?"

  I would like to tell him about the Hopi reservation, where the very ground you are standing on might crumble beneath your feet. I'd like to tell him that an owl can spell out the future. I'd like to explain what it looks like to watch someone fall twenty stories and to see, at the same time, a storm in the shape of her body begin to climb into the sky.

  I'd like to apologize.

  But instead I find myself going to pieces. Eric sits down on the floor of the trailer with me in his arms. He lets me keep all my words to myself.

  "Dee," he says after a while, "will you promise me something?"

  I draw away, wondering if he, like Sophie, saw what had happened in the car. "What?"

  He swallows hard. "That I won't wind up like your mother."

  My heart cinches. "You won't start drinking again, Eric."

  "I wasn't talking ab