Vanishing Acts (3 page)

There are some dreams that get stuck between your teeth when you sleep, so that when you open your mouth to yawn awake they fly right out of you. But this feels too real. This feels like it has actually happened.

I've lived in New Hampshire my whole life. No citrus tree could bear a climate like ours, where we have not only White Christmases but also White Halloweens. I pull down the yellow ball: a crumbling sphere made of birdseed and suet. What does grilla mean?

I am still thinking about this the next morning after taking Sophie to school, and spend an extra ten minutes walking around, from the painting easel to the blocks to the bubble station, to make up for my shoddy behavior yesterday. I've planned on doing a training run with Greta that morning, but I'm sidetracked by the sight of my father's wallet on the floor of my Expedition. He'd taken it out a few nights ago to fill the tank with gas; the least I can do is swing by the senior center to give it back. I pull into the parking lot and open the back hatch. “Stay,” I tell Greta, who whumps her tail twice. She has to share her seat with emergency rescue equipment, a large cooler of water, and several different harnesses and leashes. Suddenly I feel a prickle on my wrist; something has crawled onto my arm. My heart kicks itself into overdrive and my throat pinches tight, as it always does at the thought of a spider or a tick or any other creepy-crawly thing. I manage to strip away my jacket, sweat cooling on my body as I wonder how close the spider has landed near my boots.

It's a groundless phobia. I have climbed out on mountain ledges in pursuit of missing people; I have faced down criminals with guns; but put me in the room with the tiniest arachnid and I just may pass out.

The whole way into the senior center, I take deep breaths. I find my father standing on the sidelines, watching Yoga Tuesday happen in the function room.

“Hey,” he whispers, so as not to disturb the seniors doing sun salutations. “What are you doing here?”

I fish his wallet out of my pocket. “Thought you might be missing this.”

“So that's where it went,” he says. “There are so many perks to having a daughter who does search and rescue.”

“I found it the old-fashioned way,” I tell him. “By accident.” He starts moving down the hall. “Well, I knew it would turn up eventually,” he says. “Everything always does. You have time for a cup of coffee?”

“Not really,” I say, but I follow him to the little kitchenette anyway and let him pour me a mug, then trail him into his office. When I was a little girl, he'd bring me here and keep me entertained while he was on the phone by doing sleight-of-hand with binder clips and handkerchiefs. I pick up a paperweight on his desk. It is a rock painted to look like a ladybug, a gift I made for him when I was about Sophie's age.

“You could probably get rid of this, you know.”

“But it's my favorite.” He takes it out of my hand, puts it back in the center of his desk.

“Dad?” I ask. “Did we ever plant a lemon tree?”

“A what?” Before I can repeat my question he squints at me, then frowns and summons me closer. “Hang on. You've got something sticking out of ... no, lower ... let me.” I lean forward, and he cups his hand around the back of my neck. “The Amazing Cordelia,” he says, just like when we did our magic act. Then, from behind my ear, he pulls a strand of pearls.

“They were hers,” my father says, and he guides me to the mirror that hangs on the back of his office door. I have a vague recollection of the wedding photo from last night. He fastens the clasp behind me, so that we are both looking in the mirror, seeing someone who isn't there.

The offices of the New Hampshire Gazette are in Manchester, but Fitz does most of his work from the office he's fixed up in the second bedroom of his apartment in Wexton. He lives over a pizza place, and the smell of marinara sauce comes through the forced-hot-air ducts. Greta's toenails click up the linoleum stairs, and she sits down outside his apartment, in front of a life-size cardboard cutout of Chewbacca. Hanging on a hook on the back is his key; I use it to let myself inside. I navigate through the ocean of clothes he's left discarded on the floor and the stacks of books that seem to reproduce like rabbits. Fitz is sitting in front of his computer. “He}',” I say. “You promised to lay a trail for us.” The dog bounds into the office and nearly climbs up onto Fitz's lap. He rubs her hard behind the ears, and she snuggles closer to him, knocking several photos off his desk.

I bend down to pick them up. One is of a man with a hole in the middle of his head, in which he has stuck a lit candle. The second picture is of a grinning boy with double pupils dancing in each of his eyes. I hand the snapshots back to Fitz.

“Relatives?”

“The Gazette's paying me to do an article on the Strange But True.” He holds up the picture of the man with the votive in his skull. "This amazingly resourceful fellow apparently used to give tours around town at night. And I got to read a whole 1911

medical treatise from a doctor who had an eleven-year-old patient with a molar growing out of the bottom of his foot."

“Oh, come on,” I say. “Everyone's got something that's strange about them. Like the way Eric can fold his tongue into a clover, and that disgusting thing you do with your eyes.”

“You mean this?” he says, but I turn away before I have to watch. “Or how you go ballistic if there's a spider web within a mile of you?” I turn to him, thinking. “Have I always been afraid of spiders?”

“For as long as I've known you,” Fitz says. “Maybe you were Miss Muffet in a former life.”

“What if I were?” I say.

“I was kidding, Dee. Just because someone's got a fear of heights doesn't mean she died in a fall a hundred years ago.”

Before I know it, I am telling Fitz about the lemon tree. I explain how it felt as if the heat was laying a crown on my head, how the tree had been planted in soil as red as blood. How I could read the letters ABC on the bottoms of my shoes. Fitz listens carefully, his arms folded across his chest, with the same studious consideration he exhibited when I was ten and confessed that I'd seen the ghost of an Indian sitting cross-legged at the foot of my bed. “Well,” he says finally. “It's not like you said you were wearing a hoop skirt, or shooting a musket. Maybe you're just remembering something from this life, something you've forgotten. There's all kind of research out there on recovered memory. I can do a little digging for you and see what I come up with.”

“I thought recovered memories were traumatic. What's traumatic about citrus fruit?”

“Lachanophobia,” he says. “That's the fear of vegetables. It stands to reason that there's one for the rest of the food pyramid, too.”

“How much did your parents shell out for that Ivy League education?” Fitz grins, reaching for Greta's leash. “All right, where do you want me to lay your trail?”

He knows the routine. He will take off his sweatshirt and leave it at the bottom of the stairs, so that Greta has a scent article. Then he'll strike off for three miles or five or ten, winding through streets and back roads and woods. I'll give him a fifteen-minute head start, and then Greta and I will get to work. “You pick,” I reply, confident that wherever he goes, we will find him.

Once, when Greta and I were searching for a runaway, we found his corpse instead. A dead body stops smelling like a live one immediately, and as we got closer, Greta knew something wasn't right. The boy was hanging from the limb of a massive oak. I dropped to my knees, unable to breathe, wondering how much earlier I might have had to arrive to make a difference. I was so shaken that it took me a while to notice Greta's reaction: She turned in a circle, whining; then lay down with her paws over her nose. It was the first time she'd discovered something she really didn't want to find, and she didn't know what to do once she'd found it. Fitz leads us on a circuitous trail, from the pizza place through the heart of Wexton's Main Street, behind the gas station, across a narrow stream, and down a steep incline to the edge of a natural water slide. By the time we reach him, we've walked six miles, and I'm soaked up to the knees. Greta finds him crouching behind a copse of trees whose damp leaves glitter like coins. He grabs the stuffed moose Greta likes to play catch with–a reward for making her find–and throws it for her to retrieve. “Who's smart?” he croons. “Who's a smart girl?” I drive him back home, and then head to Sophie's school to pick her up. While I wait for the dismissal bell to ring, I take off the strand of pearls. There are fifty-two beads, one for each of the years my mother would have been on earth if she were still alive. I start to feed them through my fingers like the hem of a rosary, starting with prayers–that Eric and I will be happy, that Sophie will grow up safe, that Fitz will find someone to spend his life with, that my father will stay healthy. When I run out, I begin to attach memories instead, one for each pearl. There is that day she brought me to the petting zoo, a recollection I've built entirely around the photo in the album I saw several nights ago. The faintest picture of her dancing barefoot in the kitchen. The feel of her hands on my scalp as she massaged in baby shampoo. There's a flash, too, of her crying on a bed.

I don't want that to be the last thing I see, so I rearrange the memories as if they are a deck of cards, and leave off with her dancing. I imagine each memory as the grain of sand that the pearl grew around: a hard, protective shell to keep it from drifting away.

It is Sophie who decides to teach the dog how to play board games. She's found reruns of Mr. Ed on television, and thinks Greta is smarter than any horse. To ray surprise, though, Greta takes to the challenge. When we're playing and it's Sophie's turn, the bloodhound steps on the domed plastic of the Trouble game to jiggle the dice.

I laugh out loud, amazed. “Dad,” I yell upstairs, where my father is folding the wash. “Come see this.”

The telephone rings and the answering machine picks up, filling the room with Fitz's voice. “Hey, Delia, are you there? I have to talk to you.” I jump up and reach for the phone, but Sophie gets there more quickly and punches the disconnect button. “You promised,” she says, but already her attention has moved past me to something over my shoulder.

I follow her gaze toward the red and blue lights outside. Three police cars have cordoned off the driveway; two officers are heading for the front door. Several neighbors stand on their porches, watching.

Everything inside me goes to stone. If I open that door I will hear something that I am not willing to hear–that Eric has been arrested for drunk driving, that he's been in an accident. Or something worse.

When the doorbell rings, I sit very still with my arms crossed over my chest. I do this to keep from flying apart. The bell rings again, and I hear Sophie turning the knob. “Is your mom home, honey?” one of the policemen asks. The officer is someone I've worked with; Greta and I helped him find a robbery suspect who ran from the scene of a crime. “Delia,” he greets. My voice is as hollow as the belly of a cave. “Rob. Did something happen?” He hesitates. “Actually, we need to see your dad.” Immediately, relief swims through me. If they want my father, this isn't about Eric.

“I'll get him,” I offer, but when I turn around he's already standing there. He is holding a pair of my socks, which he folds over very neatly and hands to me. “Gentlemen,” he says. “What can I do for you?”

“Andrew Hopkins?” the second officer says. “We have a warrant for your arrest as a fugitive from justice, in conjunction with the kidnapping of Bethany Matthews.” Rob has his handcuffs out. “You have the wrong person,” I say, incredulous. “My father didn't kidnap anyone.”

“You have the right to remain silent,” Rob recites. “Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning–”

“Call Eric,” my father says. “He'll know what to do.” The policemen begin to push him through the doorway. I have a hundred questions: Why are you doing this to him? How could you be so mistaken? But the one that comes out, even as my throat is closing tight as a sealed drum, surprises me. “Who is Bethany Matthews?”

My father does not take his gaze off me. “You were,” he says. Eric

I'm almost late to my meeting, thanks to the dump truck in front of me. Like a dozen other state vehicles in Wexton in March, it's piled high with snow–heaps removed from the sidewalks and the parking lot of the post office and the banks pushed up at the edges of the gas station. When there is just no room for another storm's bounty, the DOT guys shovel it up and cart it away. I used to picture them driving south toward Florida, until their load had completely melted, but the truth is, they simply take the trucks to a ravine at the edge of the Wexton Golf Course and empty them there. They make a pile of snow so formidable that even in June, when the temperature hits seventy-five degrees, you'll find kids in shorts there, sledding. Here's the amazing thing: It doesn't flood. You'd think that a volume of precipitation that immense would, upon melting, have the capacity to sweep away a few cars or turn a state highway into a raging river, but by the time the snow is gone, the ground is mostly dry. Delia was in my science class the year we learned why: snow disappears. It's one of those solids that can turn directly into a vapor without ever going through that intermediate liquid stage–part of the process of sublimation.