Vanishing Acts Read online

  I wonder if she has dimples, like me. If she can bend her thumbs all the way backward, double-jointed, like Sophie and I can. If she gave me my black hair or my fear of insects. If her labor was anything like mine.

  I have spent so long sculpting her in my imagination, a combination of Marion Cunningham and Carol Brady and Ma Walton and Mrs. Cosby. She will cry when she sees me and hold me so tight that I can't breathe, and even then I will notice how seamlessly my body fits against hers. She will not be able to find words big enough to tell me how much she loves me.

  But there is another voice in my head, one that knows things are different if my mother has, in fact, been alive all this time. Why didn't she try harder to find me?

  All I ever really wanted in a mother is someone who could not be dragged from me, kicking and screaming, no matter how powerful the force of separation was. Someone who would give up her life if it meant I couldn't be a part of it.

  Someone my father has always been.

  When I fall asleep during the flight, I dream. He has just finished planting a lemon tree in my backyard. I want to make lemonade, but there isn't any fruit on the tree yet. It looks naked under that electric sky; all angles and switchbacks, skinny arms shivering.

  His hands pat the dirt down at the bottom of the tree. He turns to me but the sun is in my eyes and I smile back without really seeing his face. In my lap is a striped cat; I feel for the missing stub of its tail and it bolts out of my clutches, between two barrel cacti that remind me of munchkins from The Wizard of Oz. "What do you think, Beth?" he asks.

  The dust stains his palms red, and when he wipes them on his jeans there are two upside-down five-fingered prints that become long-necked dinosaurs with their heads reaching toward each other. I think I want a dinosaur. I want a seal, too, to keep in the bathtub.

  I tell him this, and he laughs. "I know what you want, grilla," he says, and then he swings me into his arms and so high that the sun kisses blisters onto the soles of my feet.

  Arriving at Sky Harbor Airport is, I imagine, like landing on Mars--jagged mountains and blood-red soil as far as I can see. I step out of the double glass doors and walk into a solid wall of heat. I wonder how a place like this and a place like New Hampshire could possibly be part of the same country.

  There is already a message on my cell phone from Eric--an address, actually. The lawyer sponsoring him to try a case in this state is an old classmate from law school, and someone--his secretary's cousin's friend, or something equally as complicated--has agreed to let us stay in her house while she moves in with her boyfriend.

  I collect a skittish Greta from the oversized-baggage area, rent an SUV (How long do you need it? the clerk had asked, and I had stared at the woman blankly), and pile our luggage into the backseat and trunk around the collapsible dog cage. Going through the motions only reminds me of the thousand things I don't know: what the grocery store chains are out here; how to get to this house on Los Brazos Street; when I will see my father again. Sophie's backpack slips to her elbows, her hand rides on the taut pull of Greta's leash. She follows me, bouncing on the balls of her feet, trusting me to know where we're going.

  Don't all children?

  Didn't I?

  We follow the Avis representative's directions, passing more stores and shopping malls than there are in all of New Hampshire. There seems to be a supplier for everything you might ever want or need--sushi, motorized scooters, bronze sculpture, paint-your-own ceramicware. I feel absolutely lost out here, and that, actually, is a relief. In Arizona I am not supposed to know anything; this is all naturally foreign. Unlike Wexton, here I have the right to wake up in the morning and not remember who or where I am.

  The address Eric has given me is in Mesa, and must be a mistake. The only residences on Los Brazos are in a trailer park--not one filled with tidy rows of compact, immaculate homes with little gardens and window boxes, but something that resembles an enormous junk heap. There's a dusty parking lot encapsulating fifty motor homes, none numbered, all in various states of dis-repair. Sophie kicks at the back of my seat. "Mommy," she asks, "do we get to live in a bus?"

  We drive past an old woman standing at the entrance of a trailer park, wrapped tight in a long raincoat in spite of the heat. Inside the fence, there doesn't seem to be a single living soul. I imagine how hot it must be to live inside a metal trailer, when the outdoor temperatures alone break a hundred degrees.

  We'll stay in a hotel, I decide, but then I remember that we don't have enough money for that. Eric said that this might not be a matter of weeks, but months.

  Some of the trailers have cacti planted next to their steps. Some have bronze garden ornaments stuck in the stones along their foundations. A young woman steps out of her door, and I immediately roll down my window. "Excuse me!" I call out. "I'm trying to find ..." I look down at the number Eric left in his message.

  "No habla ingles." She hurries back inside her trailer, and pulls shut all the curtains so that we cannot peek inside.

  I would drive to Eric, but he hasn't told me where he is. Before I know it, I've made a full circle through the motor home community, and I'm back on the driveway that leads out to the main road. The old woman is still standing there, and she smiles at me. She has the lined maple skin and moon face of a Native American; her short white hair is twisted into a red scarf on top of her head. Every one of her fingers is decorated with a silver ring, something I notice when she flashes us by pulling aside the lapels of her coat. Underneath, she is wearing a T-shirt that says DON'T WORRY, BE HOPI, and various items are anchored to plastic loops sewn into the satin lining of the jacket--rusted silverware, old 45s, and about ten Barbie dolls. "Garage sale today," she says. "Extra cheap!"

  Sophie's face lights up when she sees the dolls. "Mommy--"

  "Not today," I say, and I smile tightly at the woman. "Sorry."

  She shrugs and closes her coat.

  I hesitate. "Do you by any chance know which trailer is number 35677?"

  "It's right over there." Pointing, she indicates a decrepit building less than twenty feet away. "Nobody lives in it, though. Girl moved out a week ago. The neighbor's got the key."

  The neighbor's trailer has all kinds of rainbow windcatchers suspended from the overhang of the doorway. A stool with a mosaic seat and plaster-sculpted human legs and feet supports a twisted cactus whose shoots look like the tangled map of the New York subway. Hundreds of brown feathers are tied with string and leather to the green branches of a paloverde tree in the front yard.

  "Thanks," I say, and telling Sophie to wait in the car, I leave the air-conditioning running and walk up to the door. I ring the bell, twice, but there's no answer.

  "They're not home," the old woman says, as if I haven't figured this out for myself. But before I can reply, I hear the approaching whine of a police siren. Immediately, I am back in Wexton, ten seconds before my entire life fell apart. I run for the car, for Sophie.

  The police cruiser pulls in behind my rental, but when the officer gets out, he walks away from me and toward the old woman. "Now, Ruthann," he says, "how many times do I have to tell you?"

  She tightens the belt of her trench coat. "Haliksa'i, you can't tell me what I can't do."

  "This property isn't zoned commercial," the policeman says.

  "I don't see anyone selling anything."

  He flips up his sunglasses. "What's under your coat?"

  She turns to me. "That's sexual harassment, don't you think?"

  The officer seems to notice me for the first time. "Who are you? A customer?"

  "No, I'm just moving in."

  "Here?"

  "I think so," I explain. "I was looking for my key."

  The policeman pinches the bridge of his nose. "Ruthie, get yourself a table at one of those Indian flea markets, okay? Don't make me come back here." He gets back into his car and zooms down the block again.

  The old woman sighs and trudges up to the front door that I've been knocking on. "Hold y