Vanishing Acts Read online

  I stare at him, speechless. He starts to repeat his confession, but I stop him before I have to hear it again. "Don't tell me," I interrupt. "Don't say anything else, all right?"

  Part of me has shifted into automatic defense attorney mode. If your client confesses--and they almost always want to--you put in earplugs and go about doing your job. Whatever the vice--felony or misdemeanor, murder or, Jesus Christ, kidnapping--you can still find a way to make a jury see the shades of gray involved.

  But part of me is not an attorney, just Delia's fiance. A man who needs to hear the truth, so that he can tell it to her. What kind of person steals a child? What would I do to the son of a bitch who took Sophie?

  I look down at the arrest warrant again. "Bethany Matthews," I read out loud.

  "That ... used to be her name."

  He doesn't have to explain the rest; I know in that instant we're talking about Delia. That she is the little girl who was stolen a lifetime ago.

  I know better than most people that a criminal isn't always a thug in a black leather jacket with a big brand on his forehead to warn us away. Criminals sit next to us on the bus. They pack our groceries and cash our paychecks for us and teach our children. They look no different from you or me. And that's why they get away with it.

  The lawyer in me urges caution, remembers that there are mitigating circumstances I don't yet know. The rest of me wonders if Delia cried when he took her. If she was scared. If her mother spent years searching for her.

  If she still is.

  "Eric, listen ..."

  "You'll be arraigned tomorrow in New Hampshire on the fugitive charges," I interrupt. "But you've been indicted by an Arizona grand jury. We'll have to go there to enter a plea."

  "Eric--"

  "Andrew"--I turn my back on him--"I can't. I just can't, right now." I am about to exit the lockup, but at the last moment, I walk back toward the cell. "Is she yours?"

  "Of course she's mine!"

  "Of course?" I snap. "For God's sake, Andrew, I just found out that you're a kidnapper. I have to tell Delia you're a kidnapper. I don't exactly think it's an unreasonable question." I take a deep breath. "How old was she?"

  "Four."

  "And in twenty-eight years you never told her?"

  "She loves me." Andrew looks down at the floor. "Would you risk losing that?"

  Without answering, I turn and walk away.

  When I was eleven, I realized that Delia Hopkins was female. She wasn't like ordinary girls: she didn't have the dreamy, loopy handwriting that reminded us of soap bubbles lined up in a row; she didn't giggle behind her hand in a way that made us wonder what we'd done wrong; she didn't come to school with neat braids twisted like French crullers. Instead, she spoke to frogs. She could make a slap shot from the blue line. She was the first one to cut her palm with Fitz's Swiss army knife when we three made a blood vow, and she didn't even flinch.

  The summer after fifth grade, everything changed. Without even trying, I smelled Delia's hair when she sat near me. I noticed how her brown summer skin stretched tight over the muscles of her shoulders. I watched her tilt her face to the sun and felt an answer in my own body.

  I kept these thoughts a secret through the first half of sixth grade, until Valentine's Day. It was the first time in school that we weren't forced to bring in a card for everyone in the class, including the kid who picked his nose and the Missing Link, who had so much hair on her arms and back you could practically braid it. Girls flitted around the cafeteria like butterflies, alighting long enough to plant kisses on the bright cheeks of boys they liked. When it happened, you'd pretend to be disgusted, but there would be a coal burning inside you.

  Fitz got a card from Abigail Lewis, who had just gotten glow-in-the-dark braces and, it was rumored, invited select boys into the custodian's closet to watch them light up. In my own back pocket was a folded pink heart that I'd glued to a square of red construction paper. When I'm with you, bells go off in my head, I had written, and then added: Like a moving truck that's backing up.

  I was going to give it to Delia, but a thousand times that day, the moment hadn't been right--Fitz was with us, or she was too busy rummaging in her locker, or the teacher came by before I could pass it across the aisle. I slipped it out of my pocket just in time to have Fitz grab it out of my hand. "You got a card, too, didn't you?" He read it aloud, and he and Delia started to laugh.

  Angry, I snatched it back. "I didn't get it from someone, you jerk. I'm giving it." And because Delia was still sort of laughing, I marched right past her and up to the first girl I saw, Itzy Fisher, carrying a hot lunch tray. "Here," I said, and I shoved the card between her napkin and her slab of pizza.

  There was absolutely nothing special about Itzy Fisher. She had long frizzy hair that nearly touched her behind, and she wore gold-rimmed glasses that sometimes caught the light in class and made little reflections dance on the blackboard. I had barely said three words to her all year.

  "Itzy Fisher?" Delia accused when I sat back down. "You like her?" And then she got up and ran out of the cafeteria.

  Groaning, I flopped my head down on my arms. "I didn't make that card for Itzy. It was for Delia."

  "Delia?" Fitz said.

  "You wouldn't understand."

  Fitz stared right at me. "What makes you think that?"

  In the thousands of times I have replayed this moment over the years, I realize that what happened next could have gone a different way. That had Fitz been less of a best friend, or more competitive, or even more honest with himself, my life might have turned out very different. But instead, he asked me for a dollar.

  "Why?"

  "Because she's pissed at you," he said, as I fished into my lunch money. "And I can fix that."

  He took a Sharpie from his binder and wrote something across George Washington's face. Then he creased the bill the long way. He brought up the bottom edge and then the halves, turned it over, and tucked in both sides. A few more maneuvers and then he handed me a dollar folded into the shape of a heart.

  When I found Delia, she was sitting underneath the water fountain near the gym. I handed her Fitz's heart. I watched her open it, read the message along with her: If all I could ever have is you, I'd be a billionaire.

  "Itzy might get jealous," Delia said.

  "Itzy and I broke up."

  She burst out laughing. "That's the shortest relationship in history."

  I glanced over at her. "You're not still mad at me, are you?"

  "That depends. Did you write this?"

  "Yes," I lied.

  "Can I keep the dollar?"

  I blinked. "I guess."

  "Then no," she said. "I'm not mad."

  I waited for years to see Delia spend that dollar on something--every time she pulled out money to buy candy or ice cream or a Coke, I'd scan it for Fitz's words. But as far as I know she never spent it. As far as I know, she has it, still.

  When I go into Andrew's house, it's quiet. I call for Delia, but there's no answer. Wandering around, I check the bathroom and the living room and the kitchen, and then I hear noise coming from upstairs. The door to Sophie's room is closed; when I open it she is on the floor, playing with the Crime Scene Dollhouse. Delia and I got to calling it that when Sophie would leave the rooms with the contents overturned, a Barbie or two spread-eagled on the floor of the kitchen or bathroom. "Daddy," she says, "did you bring Grandpa home?"

  "I'm working on it," I tell her, ruffling her hair. "Where's Mommy?"

  "Out back with Greta." Sophie holds a Ken doll up to the front door. "Open up. It's the police," she says.

  When I look at Sophie, I see Delia. Not just in the physical features--Delia's dark hair and rosy cheeks are duplicated in our daughter--but their expressions are identical. Like how a smile unfurls across both their faces, a sail caught in a rip of wind. And the habit they have of separating the food on their plates into similar colors. Or the way, when they look at me, I so badly want to be who they see.