Vanishing Acts Read online

  I park in front of the trailer and let myself inside quietly. It is barely six in the morning; Eric and Sophie will still be asleep. I reach into the cabinet above the sink and take out the coffee grounds, start a fresh pot, and suddenly feel hands on my shoulders and a kiss on my cheek.

  A kiss.

  "You're up early," Eric says.

  He is dressed to the nines in a dark gray suit and a crimson tie, so striking with his dark hair and light eyes that it takes my breath away. "I was ... having trouble sleeping," I say. "I went out." Is it lying if I do not tell him I've been gone the whole night, and he doesn't ask?

  He sits down at the table, and I bring him some orange juice. But instead of taking a sip of it, he traces the yawning mouth of the glass. "Delia," he says. "I'm going to do the best I can today."

  "I know that."

  "But I also wanted to say I'm sorry."

  My mind swirls with sentences I read last night in Fitz's writing. "For what?"

  Eric looks at me with so much unsaid that I expect the moment to crystallize, fall to the table like a marble. But he lifts his glass, breaking the spell. "Just in case," he says.

  Eric understands that the world is rarely the way it is supposed to be. And he knows that, given the chance, we don't have to wait for someone to make messes of our lives. We do a good enough job, ourselves.

  Sophie thumps down the hallway, dragging one of her stuffed animals by its arm. "You woke me up," she accuses, but she crawls into Eric's lap, trusting one of the very people she's just blamed. She rubs her nose with the sleeve of her nightgown and leans against his lapel, still half-asleep.

  We make messes of our lives, but every now and then, we manage to do something that's exactly right.

  The challenge is figuring out which is which.

  There is a playroom staffed by volunteers at the courthouse, a place where Sophie can crawl through tunnels and twist pipe cleaners while, upstairs, her grandfather stands trial for kidnapping. I drop her off with a promise to come back soon, and then head into the courtroom to take my seat.

  I am waylaid by reporters, who corner me with their microphones: Have you reconciled with your mother, Delia? Have you maintained contact with your father? I shove past the hooks and claws of their questions and duck into the courtroom. Eric is already at the defense table, organizing files with Chris Hamilton, his second chair. There are more reporters queuing in the rear, artists with sketch pads. And leaning against the far wall is Fitz, his eyes locked on me.

  A side door opens and two bailiffs escort my father inside. He is wearing a suit again, but his face is pillowed and bruised, as if he has recently been in a fight. He is freshly shaved.

  I used to love to watch my father shave. I had no mother to show me the wonders of blush and mascara; to me the mystery was watching the cream rise like a meringue in my father's palm, and then using it to paint the curve of his jaw. I'd make him put it on my cheeks, too. I'd pretend to shave beside him with a toothbrush. Then we would lean into the mirror together--my father checking for spots he had missed; and me, glancing from his eyes and jaw and lips to mine, trying to find all the matches.

  As a child, all I ever wanted was to grow up to be just like him.

  It's really hard to hate a pregnant woman. Emma Wasserstein stands up and walks heavily toward the jury box, bellying up to the polished railing. "Imagine that you are four years old, ladies and gentlemen, living in Scottsdale with your mother. You have a pink bedspread and a swing set in your backyard and you go to nursery school. You see your father on weekends, like you have ever since your parents divorced. And you are happy.

  "But then one day, your father tells you you aren't Bethany anymore. You don't understand this, not any more than you've understood the fast flight from town, the motels, the new clothes, the dyed hair. When he introduces you to strangers, he calls you 'Delia.' You say you want to go back home, and he tells you you can't. He says that your mother is dead."

  She begins to walk back to the prosecutor's table. "Because he's your father, because you love him and trust him, you believe him. You believe your mother really is gone. You believe you aren't Bethany anymore--you believe you never have been.

  "You move to New Hampshire and watch your father, now calling himself Andrew Hopkins, being hailed as a model citizen. You live the story he creates for you. And you forget, for twenty-eight years, that you were ever once a victim."

  She faces the jury again. "But there was a second victim here, who never forgot. Elise Matthews woke up every morning wondering if this was the day her baby would be returned to her. Elise Matthews spent a quarter of a century not knowing if Bethany was still alive, not knowing where she might be, not even knowing what she might look like anymore."

  Emma folds her hands around her prodigious belly. "The relationship between an adult and a child is not an equal one. We are bigger and stronger and wiser, and because of that, we enter into an unwritten contract that grants us the responsibility to put a child's interests before our own. Charles Matthews, ladies and gentlemen, violated that contract. He took a little girl with no regard for her emotional well-being and forced her into an unfamiliar, frightening life, three thousand miles away from her real home. He'll try to tell you he was being a hero. He'll try to get you to buy his lies, too. But here is the truth, ladies and gentlemen: Charles Matthews decided he was not happy with the custody arrangement worked out between himself and his ex-wife, Elise, and so he took what he wanted and ran."

  She turns to the jury again. "Two thousand children vanish every single day in this country. The most recent report of the National Incident Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Thrownaway Children Report found that 797,500 children went missing in 1999. Of those, only 58,200 were nonfamily abductions. Which means that every day in the United States, thousands of parents kidnap their own children, just like Charles Matthews did--because they can. But sooner or later, if we're lucky, we catch up to them." Turning, Emma points to my father. "For twenty-eight years, that man got away with breaking a mother's heart. For twenty-eight years, he got away with breaking his daughter's trust. For twenty-eight years, he got away with breaking the law. Don't let him get away with it for another minute."

  Eric stands. "What Ms. Wasserstein hasn't told you, ladies and gentlemen," he says, "is that Elise Matthews was damaged long before that broken heart. An alcoholic, lying in her own vomit, unconscious--that was the mother Bethany Matthews inherited. That was the woman entrusted to care for her, the woman who was too drunk to even realize that her daughter was there. Did Andrew Hopkins take his daughter? Absolutely. But it wasn't an act of vengeance, it was an act of mercy."

  Walking around behind my father, Eric puts his hand on one shoulder. "Mrs. Wasserstein would like you to believe that this man plotted and planned, intending to ruin his daughter's life during a routine custody visit, but that's not the case. The truth is, Andrew did bring his child home that day. And he found the television blaring, the house wrecked ... and Elise Matthews passed out and reeking of alcohol. Maybe at that moment, Andrew Hopkins remembered the image of his daughter, lying still in an ICU bed just months before, after her mother's neglect led to a near-fatal scorpion sting. Maybe he even tried to keep his child from having to witness her mother in that state. Only one thing is certain: He knew, unequivocally, that he couldn't bring his child back to that. Not then, and not for another second.

  "Why didn't he go to the authorities then? Because, ladies and gentlemen, the courts were biased against Andrew already, for reasons you'll learn. Because in our legal system in the late seventies, custody almost always went to the mother following a divorce, even a mother who wasn't capable even of caring for herself, much less a child."

  Eric heads back to his seat, hesitating midway. "You all know what you would have wanted to do, if you'd come home to find your ex-spouse too drunk--again--to safely care for your child. Andrew Hopkins is guilty of one thing, ladies and gentlemen: loving his daughter enough to keep