Vanishing Acts Read online

  "You mean this?" he says, but I turn away before I have to watch. "Or how you go ballistic if there's a spider web within a mile of you?"

  I turn to him, thinking. "Have I always been afraid of spiders?"

  "For as long as I've known you," Fitz says. "Maybe you were Miss Muffet in a former life."

  "What if I were?" I say.

  "I was kidding, Dee. Just because someone's got a fear of heights doesn't mean she died in a fall a hundred years ago."

  Before I know it, I am telling Fitz about the lemon tree. I explain how it felt as if the heat was laying a crown on my head, how the tree had been planted in soil as red as blood. How I could read the letters ABC on the bottoms of my shoes.

  Fitz listens carefully, his arms folded across his chest, with the same studious consideration he exhibited when I was ten and confessed that I'd seen the ghost of an Indian sitting cross-legged at the foot of my bed. "Well," he says finally. "It's not like you said you were wearing a hoop skirt, or shooting a musket. Maybe you're just remembering something from this life, something you've forgotten. There's all kind of research out there on recovered memory. I can do a little digging for you and see what I come up with."

  "I thought recovered memories were traumatic. What's traumatic about citrus fruit?"

  "Lachanophobia," he says. "That's the fear of vegetables. It stands to reason that there's one for the rest of the food pyramid, too."

  "How much did your parents shell out for that Ivy League education?"

  Fitz grins, reaching for Greta's leash. "All right, where do you want me to lay your trail?"

  He knows the routine. He will take off his sweatshirt and leave it at the bottom of the stairs, so that Greta has a scent article. Then he'll strike off for three miles or five or ten, winding through streets and back roads and woods. I'll give him a fifteen-minute head start, and then Greta and I will get to work. "You pick," I reply, confident that wherever he goes, we will find him.

  Once, when Greta and I were searching for a runaway, we found his corpse instead. A dead body stops smelling like a live one immediately, and as we got closer, Greta knew something wasn't right. The boy was hanging from the limb of a massive oak. I dropped to my knees, unable to breathe, wondering how much earlier I might have had to arrive to make a difference. I was so shaken that it took me a while to notice Greta's reaction: She turned in a circle, whining; then lay down with her paws over her nose. It was the first time she'd discovered something she really didn't want to find, and she didn't know what to do once she'd found it.

  Fitz leads us on a circuitous trail, from the pizza place through the heart of Wexton's Main Street, behind the gas station, across a narrow stream, and down a steep incline to the edge of a natural water slide. By the time we reach him, we've walked six miles, and I'm soaked up to the knees. Greta finds him crouching behind a copse of trees whose damp leaves glitter like coins. He grabs the stuffed moose Greta likes to play catch with--a reward for making her find--and throws it for her to retrieve. "Who's smart?" he croons. "Who's a smart girl?"

  I drive him back home, and then head to Sophie's school to pick her up. While I wait for the dismissal bell to ring, I take off the strand of pearls. There are fifty-two beads, one for each of the years my mother would have been on earth if she were still alive. I start to feed them through my fingers like the hem of a rosary, starting with prayers--that Eric and I will be happy, that Sophie will grow up safe, that Fitz will find someone to spend his life with, that my father will stay healthy. When I run out, I begin to attach memories instead, one for each pearl. There is that day she brought me to the petting zoo, a recollection I've built entirely around the photo in the album I saw several nights ago. The faintest picture of her dancing barefoot in the kitchen. The feel of her hands on my scalp as she massaged in baby shampoo.

  There's a flash, too, of her crying on a bed.

  I don't want that to be the last thing I see, so I rearrange the memories as if they are a deck of cards, and leave off with her dancing. I imagine each memory as the grain of sand that the pearl grew around: a hard, protective shell to keep it from drifting away.

  It is Sophie who decides to teach the dog how to play board games. She's found reruns of Mr. Ed on television, and thinks Greta is smarter than any horse. To my surprise, though, Greta takes to the challenge. When we're playing and it's Sophie's turn, the bloodhound steps on the domed plastic of the Trouble game to jiggle the dice.

  I laugh out loud, amazed. "Dad," I yell upstairs, where my father is folding the wash. "Come see this."

  The telephone rings and the answering machine picks up, filling the room with Fitz's voice. "Hey, Delia, are you there? I have to talk to you."

  I jump up and reach for the phone, but Sophie gets there more quickly and punches the disconnect button. "You promised," she says, but already her attention has moved past me to something over my shoulder.

  I follow her gaze toward the red and blue lights outside. Three police cars have cordoned off the driveway; two officers are heading for the front door. Several neighbors stand on their porches, watching.

  Everything inside me goes to stone. If I open that door I will hear something that I am not willing to hear--that Eric has been arrested for drunk driving, that he's been in an accident. Or something worse.

  When the doorbell rings, I sit very still with my arms crossed over my chest. I do this to keep from flying apart. The bell rings again, and I hear Sophie turning the knob. "Is your mom home, honey?" one of the policemen asks.

  The officer is someone I've worked with; Greta and I helped him find a robbery suspect who ran from the scene of a crime. "Delia," he greets.

  My voice is as hollow as the belly of a cave. "Rob. Did something happen?"

  He hesitates. "Actually, we need to see your dad."

  Immediately, relief swims through me. If they want my father, this isn't about Eric. "I'll get him," I offer, but when I turn around he's already standing there.

  He is holding a pair of my socks, which he folds over very neatly and hands to me. "Gentlemen," he says. "What can I do for you?"

  "Andrew Hopkins?" the second officer says. "We have a warrant for your arrest as a fugitive from justice, in conjunction with the kidnapping of Bethany Matthews."

  Rob has his handcuffs out. "You have the wrong person," I say, incredulous. "My father didn't kidnap anyone."

  "You have the right to remain silent," Rob recites. "Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning--"

  "Call Eric," my father says. "He'll know what to do."

  The policemen begin to push him through the doorway. I have a hundred questions: Why are you doing this to him? How could you be so mistaken? But the one that comes out, even as my throat is closing tight as a sealed drum, surprises me. "Who is Bethany Matthews?"

  My father does not take his gaze off me. "You were," he says.

  Eric

  I'm almost late to my meeting, thanks to the dump truck in front of me. Like a dozen other state vehicles in Wexton in March, it's piled high with snow--heaps removed from the sidewalks and the parking lot of the post office and the banks pushed up at the edges of the gas station. When there is just no room for another storm's bounty, the DOT guys shovel it up and cart it away. I used to picture them driving south toward Florida, until their load had completely melted, but the truth is, they simply take the trucks to a ravine at the edge of the Wexton Golf Course and empty them there. They make a pile of snow so formidable that even in June, when the temperature hits seventy-five degrees, you'll find kids in shorts there, sledding.

  Here's the amazing thing: It doesn't flood. You'd think that a volume of precipitation that immense would, upon melting, have the capacity to sweep away a few cars or turn a state highway into a raging river, but by the time the snow is gone, the ground is mostly dry. Delia was in my science class the year we learned why: snow disappe