Vanishing Acts Read online

  "I ... suppose I did."

  "Did you pass out?"

  "Mr. Talcott," my mother says evenly, "I know what you're trying to do. And I'm the first to admit that I have not been a saint. But can you honestly tell me that you've never in your life made a mistake?"

  Eric stiffens. "I get to ask the questions, Mrs. Vasquez."

  "Maybe I wasn't the most competent mother in the world, but I loved my child. And maybe I wasn't a responsible adult, but I learned from my mistakes. I shouldn't have been punished for twenty-eight years. No one deserves that."

  Eric wheels around so quickly that my mother rears back in her chair. "You want to talk about deserving? What about a childhood of coming home from school and wondering what you're going to see when you open the door?" he asks. "Or hiding the invitations to open school night in the hope that your mother won't show up, drunk, and embarrass you? Or being the only third grader who knows how to do his own laundry and go food shopping because nobody else was doing it for me?"

  The courtroom goes so silent that the walls seem to have a pulse. Judge Noble frowns. "Counselor?"

  "For her," Eric corrects, his face flushed. He sinks into his chair. "Nothing further."

  "I'm fine," Eric assures me minutes later, when we have adjourned for a recess. "I just forgot where I was for a moment." In the conference room where we've sequestered ourselves, he raises a Styrofoam cup, his hand still trembling. Some water splashes onto his shirt and tie. "It might even have worked in our favor."

  I do not know what to say. As it is, I am shaken myself: I knew what to expect in terms of testimony, but I never considered the cost of what memories it was going to jog.

  "I'll get some paper towels," I manage, and I head toward the ladies' room.

  Standing in front of the sink, I burst into tears.

  I lean down and splash my face with cold water, until the collar of my blouse is damp. "Here," says a voice, and I am handed a paper towel.

  When I look up, my mother is standing next to me.

  "I'm sorry you had to listen to that," she says quietly. "I'm sorry I had to say it."

  I press the towel against my face, so that she won't see that I'm crying. She rummages in her purse and then opens a small ceramic pillbox. "Take this. It'll help."

  I look at the caplets in my hand skeptically, picturing her witch's workbench.

  "It's Tylenol," she says dryly.

  I swallow them and wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. "Where did you go?" I ask.

  She shakes her head. "When?"

  "You left us, once. You went away, maybe for a week."

  My mother leans against the wall. "You were so little. I can't believe you even remember."

  "Yeah," I say. "Go figure. Were you getting drunk? Or were you getting dry?"

  She sighs. "Your father gave me an ultimatum."

  I hadn't been told where she'd gone. I had wondered if I'd done something wrong, that made her vanish. I had spent that week being extra careful: picking up my toys after I was done playing, looking both ways before I stepped off the curb, brushing my teeth for two whole minutes each time.

  I'd wondered if she'd come back.

  I'd wondered if I wanted her to.

  I never said these things to my father, keeping my fear from him the same way he kept his from me.

  "Did it work?" I ask.

  "For a while. And then ... like everything else ... it didn't." My mother looks up at me. "Your father and I never should have gotten married, Delia. It all happened very fast--we hardly knew each other, and then I got pregnant."

  I swallow hard. "Didn't you love him?"

  She rubs at an invisible mark on the sink counter. "There are two kinds of love, mija. In the safe kind, you look for someone who's exactly like you. It's what most folks settle for. But then there's the other kind of love. Everyone's born with a ragged edge, and some folks crave the piece that's a perfect fit. You'll search for it forever, if you have to. And if you're lucky enough to find it, it looks so right, you start to tear at your own seams, thinking, maybe I could look just as perfect. But then, of course, when you try to get close to their other half, you don't fit anymore." She looks up at me. "That kind of love ... you come out of it a different person than you were when you started."

  She takes a deep breath. "I was a high school dropout who worked in a biker bar. Your father was the sort of person who had already planned out his life. He actually thought I was capable of being a mother, of taking care of a family--and God, I wanted to believe him. I wanted to be the person he saw when he looked at me ... it was so much more than I ever imagined of myself." She smiles faintly. "Like you," my mother says. "I desperately wanted to be someone who didn't really exist, because that was who he loved."

  She leans toward me and fixes the collar of my shirt. It is such a maternal, intimate thing to do that it takes me by surprise. Then she reaches into her pocket, and slips something into my hand.

  It is a small red cloth bag, sewn shut, and it burns against my skin. Suddenly, I can smell the rotten flesh of mangoes and sunspotted tomatoes in a Mexican mercado; I can taste the bitter blood of a hundred babies being born. I can see vendors shoulder to shoulder, calling out, ?Que le damos? I can see an old woman kneeling on a quilt beside a statue of an owl, a red candle growing from its beak. I notice iguanas the length of my legs and packs of Tarot cards wrapped in plastic and keychains made of the neckbones of rattlesnakes. I smell urine and roasted corn and the smiling raw mouth of a watermelon. It is my mother's world, I realize, in the palm of my hand.

  I stare down at it. "I don't want your help," I say.

  My mother folds my fingers over the tiny purse. "No. But your father might."

  Former detective Orwell LeGrande has spent the past fifteen years of his retirement from the Scottsdale PD on a houseboat in the middle of Lake Powell. His skin is the crusty brown of cowboy leather; his hands are leopard-dotted with sunspots. "In 1977," he replies to the prosecutor, "I was with the violent crimes unit."

  "Did you ever have any contact with Elise Matthews?"

  "I was on duty on June 20 when she called to report her daughter missing. I responded with several officers. When we got to the defendant's apartment, Ms. Matthews was a wreck. Her child had been due back the previous evening, at five P.M., after a custody visit with the defendant, but she never came home."

  "What did you do?" Emma asks.

  "I called the local hospitals to see if the child and her father had been admitted. But there was no record of their names, or of any John or Jane Doe with the same characteristics. Then I checked the registry of motor vehicles, to see if the car had been reported stolen or in an accident. A search of the apartment led me to believe we might have an abduction on our hands."

  "What happened next?"

  "I had dispatch put out a message to local officers, so they could alert us if the car or the subjects were found."

  "Detective, what other measures did you take to try to find the defendant?"

  "We got his credit card records, but he was smart enough to not use plastic on the road. And we got access to his bank account."

  "What did that reveal?"

  "It had been closed out on June 17 at 9:32 A.M., with a withdrawal of $10,000."

  Emma pauses. "Do you remember what day of the week that was?"

  LeGrande nods. "Friday."

  "Let me get this straight," Emma says. "The defendant withdrew $10,000 from his bank account on the Friday before his scheduled custody visit?"

  "That's correct."

  "As an experienced detective, did you consider that to be an important detail?"

  "Absolutely," LeGrande says. "It was the first piece of proof I had that Charles Matthews had deliberately planned to kidnap his daughter."

  Rubio Greengate has a head full of snakes. Cornrowed in crazy stripes and patterns, they end in long ropes that fall to his waist. With his two front teeth made of solid gold, and his baggy black pants and vest, he is a mo