Vanishing Acts Read online

  I don't want him sitting here for five days, thinking about going to prison; I can protect him from his own future for at least that long. So I look him in the eye and lie to him. "I don't know, Andrew."

  It isn't until I have left the jail that I realize I'm no better than he is.

  By the time I get home, it is twilight. Delia sits on the steps of the trailer, stroking Greta. "Hey," I say, kneeling down in front of her. "Are you okay?"

  "You tell me," she says, brittle, brushing her hair away from her face. "Since I don't seem to have any clue at all about myself."

  As I sit down next to her, Greta gets up and moves away from us, as if she knows I've taken over the helm of support. "Where's Sophie?"

  "Napping."

  "And Fitz?"

  "I sent him home," she says. She draws her knees up and wraps her arms tight around them. "Do you know how many people I've come across on a job, who tell me they didn't even know they were off course until it was too late? Hikers who take a wrong turn, novice campers who misread a map--they all say they thought they were somewhere else." She stares at me. "I never really believed them, until now."

  "Sweetheart, listen--"

  "I don't want to listen, Eric. I don't want to be told anymore who I used to be. I want to fucking remember it myself." Tears swim in her eyes. "What is wrong with me?"

  I reach out, intending to draw her into my arms, but as soon as my hands slide across her shoulder blades, she stiffens.

  He was scratching her back ...

  His hands went underneath her skirt ...

  She looks up at me with tears in her eyes. "Sophie," she says. "She was with him, alone."

  "You got there first," I tell her, because I need to believe it myself. She ducks her head, lost in thought. "I'll be inside if you need me."

  She tucks her hair behind her ears and nods. But then, it's never the finding part that's been a problem for Delia. It's coming to terms with being lost.

  It's choice that makes us human: I could put this bottle down at any time, or I could continue till it's empty. I can tell myself I know exactly what I'm doing; I can convince myself that it will take much more than a few drinks to slide down to a pit I cannot climb out from.

  And, oh, God, the taste of it. The sooty smoke in the back of the throat; the burn on the flesh of my lips. The stream of it through the baleen of my teeth. After a day like this one, anyone would need to unwind a little.

  Tonight, the moon is jaundiced and scarred. It's so close to the roof of Ruthann's trailer that for a moment I imagine that the corner of the roof might prick it, send it flying like a pierced balloon.

  Why do they call it a mobile home, if it never goes anywhere?

  "Eric?" A sliver of light splinters my arm, then my leg, then half of my body as Delia opens the door. "Are you still out here?"

  I manage to slide the whiskey bottle behind my calf where she can't see it.

  She sits down on the step behind me. "I just wanted to say that I'm sorry. I know this isn't your fault."

  If I answer, she'll smell the booze on my breath. So instead, I just hang my head, and hope she thinks I'm overwhelmed.

  "Come inside," she says, reaching for my hand, and I'm so grateful for this that when I stand up I forget what I've been hiding, and the bottle rolls down the steps.

  "Did you drop something?" Delia asks, but as her eyes adjust to the darkness, she sees the label. "Oh, Eric," she murmurs, a boatload of disillusion in those broken syllables.

  By the time I shake myself out of my stupor enough to follow her inside, she's already hauled a sleeping Sophie into her arms. She whistles for Greta, and grabs her car keys from the counter.

  "For God's sake, Delia, it was just a little nightcap. I'm not drunk, look at me. Listen to me. I can stop whenever I feel like it."

  She turns around, our daughter caught between us. "So can I, Eric," she says, and she walks out the front door.

  I don't call her back when she gets into the Explorer. The taillights dance down the road, the sideways eyes of a demon. I sit down on the bottom step of the trailer and pick up the bottle of whiskey, which is lying on its side.

  It's half full.

  Fitz

  It takes a while to get Sophie settled in my motel room, with Greta curled on the edge of the bed like a sentry. Then, using the tiny immersion heater that shares a plug with the hair dryer in the bathroom, I boil water for tea. I bring a cup of it out to Delia, who is sitting outside the motel room on one of the plastic lawn chairs that overlook the parking lot.

  "Let's see," she says. "In less than twelve hours' time, I found out that I was abused as a child and that my fiance's fallen off the wagon. I figure I'm due to come down with cancer any minute, don't you think?"

  "God forbid," I tell her.

  "Brain tumor."

  "Shut up." I sit down beside her.

  "All those things he was saying in the courtroom," she says. "Didn't Eric even listen to himself?"

  "I don't know if he wanted to," I admit. "I think he would have rather believed he was who you wanted him to be."

  "Are you saying this is my fault?"

  "No. Not any more than the other is your father's."

  Her mouth snaps shut, and she takes a sip of her tea. "I hate it when you're right," she says. And then, more softly: "How can you be a survivor, when you can't even remember the war?"

  I take the cup out of her hand and spread her palm flat on top of mine, then turn it over as if I am about to read her future. I trace the life line and the love line; I trail my fingers over the cords of her wrist. "None of it changes anything," I tell her. "No matter what your father said up there. You're the same person you were before he said it."

  She pushes me away. "What if you found out that you used to be a girl, Fitz? And that you had operations and everything and you don't remember a single bit of it?"

  "That's just crazy," I reply, my masculine pride kicking in. "There'd be scars."

  "Well, don't you think I have those, too? What else do you think I've forgotten?"

  "Alien abduction?" I joke.

  "No, just a plain human one," she says bitterly.

  "Would you like my childhood memories, instead? How about the one where my father leaves my mother for a month when he can't stop gambling in Vegas? Or the one where she holds a kitchen knife up to him and tells him he will never, ever, bring his whore to her house again. Or maybe you'd like the one where she swallows all her Valium, and I get to call nine-one-one." I stare at her. "Remembering misery is not all it's cracked up to be."

  Chagrined, she looks into her lap. "It's hard to know what to trust, that's all."

  Her words make me run cold. "Delia, I need to tell you something."

  "You used to be a girl before the operation?"

  "I'm being serious," I say. "I knew that Eric was drinking again."

  She draws back slowly. "What?"

  "I was there two days ago, and I found a bottle."

  "Why didn't you tell me?" Delia says, stung.

  "Why don't any of us tell you anything?" I respond. "We love you."

  My statement startles a hawk out of the blanket of the night; it takes to the sky with a cry. Delia turns my words over in her mind, and then glances up at me. "How is my book coming?" she asks quietly.

  "I haven't worked on it," I say, though my throat has gone narrow as the eye of a needle. "I've been busy."

  "Maybe I could help you with it," Delia suggests, and she kisses me again.

  She unspools in my arm, and although I understand she is trying to lose herself, I've been waiting too long for her to allow that to happen. I sink my fingers into her hair and unravel her ponytail; I tug at the buttons of the pajama top she arrived wearing. I sign my initials on the small of her back.

  When she starts to unbuckle my belt, I grab her wrist. We can't go into the room where Sophie's sleeping, so I haul her into the backseat of her rental car, parked two feet in front of us. It seems ridiculous, adolesc