Vanishing Acts Read online

  To say "not guilty" means a big, difficult trial, in which Delia will serve as a material witness.

  As the only other person who was with Andrew at the time of the kidnapping, she will be courted by the prosecution as well as the defense. And in spite of the fact that she is my fiancee, I can be sent to jail for telling her any details about her father's case. It is a felony to consciously or unconsciously influence what a witness says in court.

  But is it a crime for her to influence what I say?

  I smooth my hand over her hair. "Okay," I promise. "Not guilty."

  Andrew

  Does it really matter why I did it?

  By now you've already formed your own impression. You believe that an act committed a lifetime ago defines a man, or you believe that a person's past has nothing to do with his future. You think I am either a hero, or a monster. Maybe knowing more about the circumstances will make you think differently about me, but it won't change what happened twenty-eight years ago.

  There have been nightmares. Sometimes I have picked up the phone and heard Elise's voice in the pause before the telemarketer's brain kicks in. Whenever I pass a police car, I sweat. I was thrown into a panic when one of the seniors submitted my name for election to the Wexton Town Council, until I realized that the easiest place to take cover is in plain sight; no one ever looks twice at someone who acts like he has nothing to hide.

  Believe what you want, but be prepared to answer this question: In my shoes, how do you know you wouldn't have done the same thing?

  Believe it or not, there is a relief to finally getting caught. The moment I gave up my clothes for a baggy orange jumpsuit I also peeled off the skin of the person I've pretended to be. In a strange way, I belong here more than I did out there. Like me, everyone in jail has been living a lie.

  For twenty-three hours a day, I stay in my cell. That last hour, I am granted a shower and a turn around the exercise yard, where I do my best to breathe in deep and get the smell of jail out of my nostrils.

  I have asked twice now to call you; I thought that everyone was given a phone call upon arrival, but it turns out that's only true on television. I wait for Eric, but he hasn't come yet either. I imagine there are all sorts of knots made out of red tape he has to untangle before we are shipped off to Arizona.

  The last time I was there, it was a state unlike anything in the Northeast. A place where the soil was the color of blood, where snow was a fantasy, where the plants had skeletons. Just falling off the abrupt edge of Scottsdale could land you in towns that consisted of a handful of people and a gas station; back then the West was still a haven for lawless rebels. I hear those towns are now the enclaves of the rich, who have built multimillion-dollar houses into the inhospitable red cliffs, but I imagine the part of Phoenix I will be seeing is still peopled with lawless rebels, the ones who have been arrested.

  It never gets dark in jail, and it never gets quiet. The sound is a symphony: the wheezing snore of the guy one block down; the creak of a door being opened. Rain on the roof and the viper hiss of the radiator. The ping-ping-ping-ping of metal on metal as a corrections officer walks down the corridor side by side with his attitude, hitting his keys against the bars of a cell to wake up all the nearby occupants.

  The only way I am able to stand it is to think about you. This time, the memory that spreads across my mind is of the autumn weekend we drove to Killington and took a chairlift up to the top. It was October, and you were only five. When we got to the peak, the ring of Killington's mountains rose to our left and right; the valley below was a lavish tapestry of reds and golds and emeralds, studded with church spires that looked like fallen stars caught in the folds of the landscape. The Ottauquechee River scalloped a blue seam down the center, and the air already smelled of snow.

  It looked just about as different from Arizona as humanly possible. And I began to understand what New Englanders say, what I had learned long before I took refuge in New Hampshire: You never forget your first fall.

  When you're a parent you find yourself looking at the unknown that is your child, trying to find a piece of yourself inside her, because sometimes that is what it takes to stake a claim. I remember watching you making muddy mixtures in the sandbox, and wondering if a love of chemistry was something you might be born with. I remember listening to your tearful recollection of the monster in your nightmare, trying to see whether it resembled me.

  What I saw most in you, though, was your mother.

  You had an uncanny ability to find things: the diamond earring Eric's mother lost somewhere in her driveway; the old stash of comic books hidden behind a loose panel of wood in the basement; a buffalo-head nickel caught between the cracks of the sidewalk. Unlike Elise, who could discover parts of a person they didn't even know were absent, you specialized in the tangible, but that, I feared, was only a matter of time.

  When you were seven, you found a chickadee's egg that had fallen out of a nest. The egg was cracked and the bird, still embryonic and developing, was pink-skinned and pale, oddly humanistic. You and I lined a matchbox with tissues and held a private burial. "Wilbur," you intoned, "lived a short life, full of danger."

  Not unlike your own.

  You cried for a week over that damn bird--the first time that finding something, for you, became equated to loss. That was when I realized that I could take you to the far ends of the earth, but I couldn't keep your mother from surfacing. Elise was in your blood; Elise was printed upon you. And, like Elise, I was terrified that if you grew up able to find whatever it was that hollowed out a person's heart, you would wind up feeling just as empty as she had.

  God forbid, maybe you'd try to fill yourself the same way.

  I made a few phone calls and took you to meet a policeman who happened to be the son of one of the seniors who played mah-jongg every Tuesday at the center. Art was a state trooper who had a German shepherd named Jerry Lee, known for his search-and-rescue ability. He let you play hide and seek with Jerry Lee, who always won. By the time we drove home that day, you knew what you wanted to be when you grew up.

  There is a fine line between seeing something that's lost as missing, and seeing it as something that might be found. The way I figured, it was my job to make sure that you were focused correctly. In high school, I got you an apprenticeship with a local vet. In college, you adopted a hound from a shelter, and trained it for search and rescue. As a senior, you made your first big rescue: a little boy who had wandered off at a county fair. You began to get a reputation for hard work and diligence; you were called in to work with K-9 units all over New Hampshire and Vermont. I have heard you tell the story of how you got started in this business over and over to reporters and to grateful victims; you always say it began when you found a bird.

  I'm not even sure you remember anymore that it was dead.

  Sometimes parents don't find what they're looking for in their child, so they plant seeds for what they'd like to grow there instead. I've witnessed this with the former hockey player who takes his son out to skate before he can even walk. Or in the mother who gave up her ballet dreams when she married, but now scrapes her daughter's hair into a bun and watches from the wings of the stage. We are not, as you'd expect, orchestrating their lives; we are not even trying for a second chance. We're hoping that if this one thing takes root, it might take up enough light and space to keep something else from developing in our children: the disappointment we've already lived.

  Last night, before my arraignment, I started shaking. Not shivering, but the palsied kind of seizure that even made the guards bring me to the infirmary for a free nurse's check, not that she could find anything wrong. It was the sort of tremor that astronauts get when they come back to earth, that a hiker suffers after coming back down from the crest of Kilimanjaro--a bone-deep chill that has nothing to do with cold and everything with being moved from one world to another. It continued the whole time the guards snapped on handcuffs and led me underground to the court building next door;