Vanishing Acts (10 page)

After I finish, I stand in line, trying to pretend it is any other familiar queue: the line at the grocery store; the line of parents waiting in their cars to pick up children after school; the wait to sit on the lap of a mall Santa Claus. When it is my turn, the officer looks at me. “First time?”

I nod. Is it that obvious?

“I need your ID, too.” He does a double-take at my New Hampshire license, but enters the information into his computer. “Well,” he says after a moment of watching the screen, “you're clear.”

“Of what?”

“Outstanding warrants for arrest.” He hands me a visitation pass. “You want to head to that door on the left.”

I am told to pick any free locker behind me and put all my personal belongings inside. Then comes a metal detector and an elevator ride, and when the doors open, I realize where they have been hiding this jail. It is large and gray, intimidating. There are echoes: steel striking steel; a man screaming; an intercom. An inmate holding a washcloth up to his eye walks by in the company of two officers, who step into the elevator we vacate. More officers sit inside a glass booth, monitoring our progress as we are led to the visiting room.

Inside are four booths, each divided by a line of reinforced glass, a telephone intercom on each side. Round metal stools are bolted to the floor, evenly spaced like the spruces at a Christmas tree farm. There are other people waiting here, too: a woman in a burka, a teenager with an angry scar across his cheek, and a Hispanic man whispering a rosary.

My father is the last prisoner to be brought in. He is wearing striped scrubs, just like you'd see in a cartoon, and for the first time this becomes real to me. He is not going to step forward and pull off the costume, tell me this has all been a bad dream; it is really happening; it is now my life. My hand comes up to my mouth, and I know he can't hear me draw in my breath like I'm drowning, but he touches the glass between us all the same, as if it might still be that simple to reach me. He picks up the phone and mimes for me to do the same. “Delia,” he says, his voice hammered thin. “Delia, baby, I'm sorry.”

I've told myself that I won't cry, but before I know it, I'm doubled over on the tiny stool, sobbing so hard that my chest hurts. I want him to reach through the glass like the magician I used to think he was and tell me this is all just a misunderstanding. I want to believe whatever it is he has to say.

“Don't cry,” he begs.

I wipe my eyes. “Why didn't you tell me?”

“You were too little, at first. And then, when you were older, I was too selfish.” He hesitates. “You used to look at me like I was a hero. And I didn't think I could stand it if you stopped looking at me like that.”

I lean closer to the wall between us. “Then tell me now,” I insist. “Tell me the truth.”

Suddenly I remember being very small, and dumping all the pairs of tights I owned on my father's bed, a twisted ball of cabled blue and white snakes. I hate wearing these, I said to him. They always wind up bunched at my knees, and make it so that at recess, I can't run.

I thought he would protest, and tell me that I'd wear whatever was in my drawers and that was that. But instead he started to laugh. You can't run? Well, we can't have that, can we?

“We named you Bethany. You were so small when you were born–tinier even than a loaf of bread. I used a filing cabinet as a crib for you, when I took you to work with me.” He looks up at me. “I used to be a pharmacist.” A pharmacist? I scramble back over my memory, trying to find red flags I missed the first time around: my father's quick knowledge of the dosage of Baby Tylenol for Sophie's weight; his frustration when I couldn't understand high school chemistry. Why didn't he practice in New Hampshire, I wonder . . . and then I answer my own question: because he was licensed under another name, someone who disappeared off the face of the earth.

If you call yourself something different, does it change the person you are inside?

“Who were you?”

“Charles,” he says. “Charles Edward Matthews.”

“Three first names.”

He startles. “That's exactly what your mother said when we met.” I draw in my breath when he mentions her. “What was her real name?”

“Elise. I didn't lie to you about that.”

“No,” I say. “Except instead of telling me you got divorced, you said she was dead.”

Let me tell you what happens when you cook down the syrup of loss over the open fire of sorrow: It solidifies into something else. Not grief, like you'd expect, or even regret. No, it gets thick as paste, black as ash; yet it isn't until you dip a finger in and feel that sharp taste dissolving on your tongue that you realize this is anger in its purest form, unrefined; a substance to be weighed and measured and spread. I had come here, or so I thought, to make sure my father was all right, to show him that I was all right, too. I had come here to tell him that in spite of what the police had to say, in spite of what happened in court, I was not going to forget the childhood he'd given me. But suddenly, the scales don't balance, and those twenty-eight years I thought I knew are outweighed by the four I never had the chance to. “Why?” I ask, the word clenched between my teeth. “Why did you do it?” My father shakes his head. “I didn't want you to get hurt. Not then, Delia . . . and not now–”

“Don't call me that!” I am so loud that in the booth beside us, a woman turns around.

“I didn't have a choice.”

My heart is pounding, and I cannot stop. “You had a choice. You had a thousand choices. To leave or not to leave. To take me with you, or not. To tell me the truth when I was five years old, or ten, or twenty. I was the one without the choice, Dad.” I hurry out of the visiting room, so that he can feel what it's like to be the one left behind.

By the time I get back to the pink trailer, everyone's asleep. Sophie is on the couch, curled like a question mark around Greta, who opens one eye and thumps her tail at the sight of me. I kneel down and touch Sophie's brow; she's sweating. A month after she was born, I bundled her up in her winter snowsuit in preparation for a trip to the grocery store, and buckled her into the infant carrier that snaps into a car seat. I left the carrier on top of the kitchen table while I put on my own coat and boots. I was halfway to the grocery store, driving on the highway, when my cell phone rang. It was my father calling. “Missing something?” he asked. When I glanced in the rearview mirror, I realized that I'd never taken Sophie, in her infant carrier, out to the car. I'd left her on the kitchen table, strapped into the little half-moon seat.

I couldn't believe I'd left behind my own infant. I couldn't believe I hadn't felt off balance, as if I were missing an arm or a leg, since she was just as critical a part of me. Mortified, I told my father I'd come straight home. “Just go to the store,” he'd said, laughing. “She's safe with me.”

Broad hands slide under the front of my T-shirt, and I twist around to find Eric, still warm with sleep. He pulls me into the bedroom at the end of the trailer and closes the door. “Did you see him?” he whispers.

I nod.

“So?”

“I had to talk to him through a glass booth . . . and he's wearing black-and-white stripes like some kind of ... some kind of ...”

“Criminal?” Eric says softly, and that's all it takes for me to start to cry again. He wraps his arms around me, lowering me onto the bed.

“He's in there because of me,” I say. “And I don't even really know who that is anymore.”

Eric's body moves behind mine, one leg sliding warm between my own. He settles over me like fog, tracing the seam of me with his tongue. “I do,” he says. In my dream, I've been hiding. The kitchen floor glitters; it is covered with diamonds that I know are broken glass. There are shattered plates on the floor; the cabinets are wide open, with no mugs or dishes left inside.

There's yelling, almost as loud as the sound of glass breaking. I can hear it, even after my hands are pressed tight over my ears. It sounds like the inside of a drum, like the dragon that's really my breathing, like the hard knot of tears in my throat that keeps me from swallowing.

I am aware, first, of the sun rising underneath the covers. Then comes the breath, heavy and wet as sand at the bottom of the sea. I sit up in an instant and throw back the sheet to find Sophie huddled in a small knot, raging with a fever. I call for Eric, but he's gone; he has left me a note with the number of his friend's law offices. I can nearly hear my daughter's blood boiling. I ransack my luggage for a thermometer or aspirin or anything that might help, and when I come up empty-handed I carry her into the pink bathroom and stand in the tepid shower with her in my arms.

Sophie rolls her flushed face toward me, her eyes blind and blue. “There's a monster in the potty,” she says.

I glance into the toilet, where a small dark feather is floating. I flush it, twice.

“There,” I say. “Gone.” But by now, Sophie's head lolls back; she is out cold. In the bathroom there are no towels; I wrap Sophie in the shirt Eric discarded when he came home yesterday. Her teeth are chattering, her forehead blazes. She whimpers as I try to swaddle her tightly, and then hurry out the front door. It is only eight in the morning, but I kick at Ruthann Masawistiwa's door, still holding Sophie in my arms. “Please,” I beg, when she opens it. “I need to find a hospital.”

She takes one look at Sophie. “Follow me,” she says, but instead of heading for my car, she walks into our trailer. She leans out the window that I opened last night for the fresh air, the one just over the couch where Sophie was sleeping. Ruthann's knotty hands run along the seam of the sash, searching the outside edges. “Got it,” she says, and she plucks from the Windowsill a brown feather that looks like the one I flushed down the toilet.

Ruthann holds the feather outside. When she lets go, it winnows up in a draft of wind and is carried away. “Pahos,” she says, and then she points to the paloverde bush in her front yard, a few feet away from the open window, where hundreds of feathers are still tied to the branches. “They're prayer feathers. I make them to hold all the bad from last year. They're supposed to blow away in the winter, and the evil with them. I hang them up in the tree so that no one gets poisoned by coming close, but I guess one made its way to your little girl.” I blink at her, incredulous. “You expect me to believe my daughter's sick because of a ... a chicken feather? ”

“It's a turkey feather,” Ruthann says. “And why would I expect you to believe anything?” She puts the flat of her hand against Sophie's forehead. Then she gestures for me to do the same.

Sophie's skin is cool to the touch; the fire in her cheeks has faded. She is sleeping evenly, one hand unfurled on my chest like a victory flag. I swallow hard; place her gently on the bed. “I'm still taking her to the doctor.”

“Of course you are,” Ruthann says.

You think you know the world you are living in. If you can feel it, and touch it, and smell it, and taste it, then it must be so. You tell yourself that you would bet your life on the simple fact that the sky is blue. And then one day someone comes along and informs you emphatically that you're wrong. Blue, you insist. Blue as the ocean. Blue as a whale. Blue as my daughter's eyes. But that person shakes his head, and everyone else backs him up. You poor girl, they say. All of those things–the ocean, the whale, her eyes–they're green. You've gotten them mixed up. You've had it wrong all along.

Vanishing Acts

Two pediatricians, a neurologist, and three blood vials later Sophie is pronounced healthier than a mustang, whatever that means. One of the doctors, a woman with her hair pulled back so tight in a bun that it draws her eyes out at the edges, sits me down out of Sophie's range of hearing. “Has there been any trouble at home?” she asks. “Kids this age sometimes do things for attention.” But this was no sore throat or stomachache; you cannot fake the kind of sick that comes from so deep inside. “Sophie's not like that,” I explain, affronted. “I think I know my own daughter.”

The doctor shrugs, as if she has heard all this before.

I drive toward our house gingerly, reversing Ruthann's directions. In the backseat, Sophie plays with the stickers a nurse has given her. The whole way I second-guess myself: Is this the correct turn? Can I make a right on red? Did I imagine this morning's episode? Maybe faulty judgment is contagious. I realize, as I pull into the trailer park, that I am just about the same age my father was when he took me away.

I let Greta out for a while, and then take Sophie next door to Ruthann's. The old woman opens the door picking at her cuticles, which are covered with cauls of dried glue. “Siwa,” she says to Sophie. “You look much better.” Sophie vines herself around my left leg.

“And shyer,” Ruthann adds. She frowns at Sophie's face. “Open up,” she says, tapping her on the chin, and when Sophie does, Ruthann plucks a tiny pair of pink plastic sandals off her tongue, followed by strappy yellow heels, and finally a set of spa slippers. “No wonder you were feeling sick,” she says, as Sophie's eyes go wide. “Choking on all those old soles. Go on inside and see if you can find out which Barbies these belong to.”

When Sophie is gone, I look at Ruthann. “You know, I don't believe in magic.”

“Me neither,” she admits. “You never do, when you know how to do the tricks.” I follow her into the trailer. “What about this morning, then?” She shrugs. “A lucky guess. About five years back, there was a pahana–a white lady photographer–staying up near Shongopavi, and she got miserable stomach cramps all of a sudden. Indian Health Service docs couldn't figure it out, said there was nothing wrong with her. Turns out she'd taken some pahos that were lying around and tucked them in the brim of her straw hat. Soon as she brought the feathers back to where she'd found them, all the belly pain went away.” I look over my shoulder, to the nearby tree where the other feathers still wait for the breeze. “It could happen again.”

Ruthann glances up at the tree. “Tomorrow the wind will blow a different way. Sooner or later, they'll all disappear anyway.”

I watch a light gust stir the feathers. “Then what?”

“Then we do what we do best,” Ruthann says. “Start over from scratch.” Andrew

The intake area of the Madison Street Jail in Phoenix is called the Horseshoe, something I remember from the last time I was there. Not much has changed since 1976–the cinder-block walls are still cold against my shoulder blades when I lean back against them; the mug shot area is tucked into a small alcove beside the pre-intake booth; the smell of industrial cleaner seeps through the air every time a detention officer opens the door to lead another man inside. There's a line to get into jail. In the crowded pre-intake area two dozen local cops stand with their charges, rearranging themselves like some kind of cog puzzle every time a new entrant arrives. One man is bleeding from a cut above the eye; every now and then he lifts his cuffed hands to wipe it off on his wrist. Another is passed out in a chair. A prostitute standing at the mug shot background asks if she can turn the other way, because it's her better side.

I watch the freak show for about a half hour, and then I'm led behind a cubicle to the medical assistant. She's an overweight woman wearing scrubs printed with teddy bears, and she wraps a blood pressure cuff around my upper arm. The band tightens, and I imagine for a moment it is my neck, that at any moment the air will cut off and this will all be over.

“You on any medications?” she asks. "When was the last time you saw a doctor?

Have you had any alcohol in the past twenty-four hours? Are you feeling suicidal?" Right now I don't feel much of anything. As if I have developed the thick, scaly skin that this desert environment requires. As if you could prick me with a needle, a knife, a spear, and my body would not remember how to bleed. I don't tell her this, though, and the nurse rips the blood pressure cuff off my arm.

“It's about time we got a quiet one,” she says to the deputy, and hands me back. Other people are staring at me. Unlike them, arrested off the street and still wearing their sweatshirts and jeans and miniskirts, I came from a different jail. I'm wearing a jumpsuit the color of a hazard sign. I have no property in my pockets; it is already in a bag being carried by the deputy.

They are looking at me and thinking, He has done something worse. The door opens, and a detention officer calls my name. He is wearing khaki cargo pants and a SWAT vest, as if he is in the middle of a war zone, which I suppose he is. The deputy drags me through the crowd. “Have fun,” he says, turning me over to the custody of the county.

The Horseshoe reverberates with noise. There are DOs yelling to each other or into the mikes at their shoulders; doors ringing as they are slammed and locked; drunks crying out to friends they've hallucinated into existence. And then there is the bass line: the steady squelch of a working inmate's shoes on the floor as he mops; the hum of an air-exchange fan; the Christmas jingle of chains as a line of men are shuffled down the hallway. “Congratulations,” the officer says to me.

“You're the two hundredth customer today.”

It is only one o'clock in the afternoon.

“That entitles you to a door prize. Instead of a pat down, you get a strip search.” He leads me into a room to the left of a metal plate that is bolted to the wall and tells me to undress. I turn my back, which is all the privacy I'm allowed. Through the window I see a female guard watching absently.

One of my seniors, a woman who died five years ago, had been a Holocaust survivor. She had seen her sister's head shot off in front of her face; she had seen boys from her own village join the SS and send girls they had once flirted with to the gas chambers. She had been pregnant when she arrived at Dachau, and had hid the truth from the officers and eventually aborted the fetus herself, because she knew she was too weak to carry to term. When Mrs. Weiss told me about burying her baby under rocks, her voice was flat and empty. I understood then that to add hate or pain or regret or any emotion at all was simply impossible. Under that strain, she would break.

So when the officer tells me to open my mouth, raise my arms, bend down and spread my legs wide, I go somewhere else. To the center of the sky, to the sinking clay bottom of a summer lake. When he asks me to stand up and lift up my scrotum, I do not even feel myself follow his instructions. These are someone else's hands, someone else's orders, someone else's pathetic life.

“All right,” he says. “Get back into your clothes.” He opens a door farther down the hallway. Marked with a “3,” it is about half full. “Hey, dude,” one of the men inside says to the DO. “You gonna take care of this?” He points to a slick of vomit beneath the pay phone, and a man who's passed out face first in the puddle.

“Yeah, I'll get right on that,” the detention officer says, an inflection to his voice that suggests it is the lowest item on his list of priorities. Men sit on a bench along one wall, men lie on the floor, and one kid is singing “A Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” It's like fingernails on a chalkboard. “Shut the fuck up,” says a black man, and he throws an orange at the boy. There are phones. I look across the tiny tank, and wonder how we are supposed to use them, since all of our belongings and cash have been taken away. A Mexican teenager with a tear tattooed below his eye sees me looking. “Don't think about it, Pops,” he says. “It costs, like, five dollars a minute.”

“Thanks for the advice.” I step over the unconscious drunk. My shoe slips on the filth, and I have to grab onto the edge of the phone to right myself. There is a single word scratched into the metal receiver: “WHY.” It seems as good a question as any. I give the operator my home phone number for the collect call, but you don't answer.

The door to the tank opens again and a female DO screams a series of names:

“DEJESUS! ROB1NET! VALENTE! HOPKINS!” We file to the door, the lucky ones. Individually we are brought up to a counter to sign a release form cataloging all the possessions that used to be ours. I am asked to press a thumbprint onto the back of two colored cards. There is an empty space beside it; I realize that I will do the same on the day I leave. After three months or eight months or ten years in this system turn me into a different person, they will be sure they are releasing the right man.

A young girl whose hair smells like autumn is the one in charge of fingerprinting us. It is done on a machine and sent automatically to the FBI and the State of Arizona's main databank. There, it will magically connect to any other times you've been in trouble with the law.

Sophie's school recently had a Child Safety Day. They took pictures of the kids and mounted them on Safety Passports. They had the local police set up to roll the fingerprints of each boy and girl. This was all so that they would have a protocol in place if the child was ever abducted.

I helped out that day. I sat next to an officer of the Wexton PD and we made jokes about how the mothers were coming out in droves to the gymnasium at the elementary school not because they were concerned with safety, but because they had cabin fever after three days of steady snow. Child after child, I held those impossibly tiny fingers between my own, small and fleshy as peas, and rolled them across the ink pad. “Jeez,” the officer had said, when I got good at it. “Why haven't we hired you?”

Now, as I am standing in the Madison Street Jail rolling my own fingers across a blank screen, the technician seems surprised that I know how to do it myself. “A pro,” she says, and I glance up at her. I wonder if she knows that the same treatment is given to the kidnappers as the kidnapped.

From Tank Six I can see the boy in the suicide chair. A young kid with hair that covers his face, he whispers rap lyrics to himself and curls his hands into fists to pull at the restraints every now and then.

The Mexican boy who advised me not to use the phone is here, too, now. He lifts up his hands when the door opens and the DO tosses a haul of plastic bags into the air, catching two of them before they land on the floor. “Ladmo,” he says, sitting back down.

“Andrew Hopkins.”

This breaks up several of the men in the cell. “It isn't my name,” the boy says. “It's the lunch.”

I take the cellophane sack from his hand and look through the contents: six slices of white bread. Two pieces of cheese. Two rounds of questionable bologna. An orange. A cookie. A juice container. Just like what you and I pack Sophie for snack at school.

“Why does the lunch have a name?” I ask.

He shrugs. “Used to be a TV program for kids, the Wallace and Ladmo Show. They gave out goodie packs called Ladmo Bags. Guess Sheriff Jack thought it was funny.”

Across the cell, a big man shakes his head. “Ain't funny to make us pay a dollar a day for this shit.”

The Mexican sticks a long thumbnail in his orange and begins to peel it, one continuous stripe. “That's something else Sheriff Jack thinks is funny,” he says.

“Once you're inside, you got to pay for your food.”

“Hey.” A Native American man who has been asleep in the corner rubs his eyes and crawls forward to snatch a Ladmo. “What kind of animal has an asshole in the middle of its back?”

“Sheriff Jack's horse,” grumbles the big man. “If you're gonna tell a joke, at least tell one we haven't all heard a thousand times.”

The Native American's eyes harden. “Ain't my fault you pop in and out of here like some skinny dick in your mama.”

The big man stands up, his lunch tumbling to the floor. Ten square feet is a small space, but it shrinks even further when fear sucks out all the spare air. I press myself up against the wall as the big man grabs the Native American by the neck and hurls him forward in one smooth move, so that his head smashes through the plate glass.

By the time the DOs arrive, the Native American is lying in a crumpled heap on the bottom of the cell, with blood trickling down his collar, and the big man is eating his lunch. “Well, shoot,” the officer says. “That was one of the stronger windows.” When the big man gets thrown across the hallway into one of the isolation cells, the boy in the suicide chair doesn't even react. The Native American is hauled off for medical attention. The Mexican leans down and grabs the two abandoned lunch sacks. “The orange is mine,” he says.

We are told to shower, but no one does, and I am not about to stand out any more than I already do. Instead I follow the others as they strip down, each man putting his clothing into a plastic bag. In return, we are given orange flip-flops, black-and-white convict-striped shirts and pants, hot pink boxers, a hot pink thermal tee, and hot pink socks. Another of Sheriff Jack's policies, I am told; the pink keeps inmates from stealing the underwear when they're released. It is not until one of the other men turns his back that I see the writing: sheriff's inmate, unsentenced. It feels like pajamas. Loose and unstructured, an elastic around my waist. As if, at any given moment, I just might wake up.