Book 12: Vanishing Acts

      It’s the ones I don’t find that stay with
me. The teenage boy who jumped off the Orford train bridge
into the Connecticut River one frigid March; the mother from
North Conway who vanished with a pot still boiling on the
stove and a toddler in the playpen; the baby snatched out of
a car in the Strafford post office parking lot while her
sitter was inside dropping off a large package. Sometimes
they stand behind me while I’m brushing my teeth;
sometimes they’re the last thing I see before I go to
sleep; sometimes – like now – they leave me
restless in the middle of the night.
      There is a thick fog, but Greta and I have trained
enough in this patch of land to know our way by heart. I sit
down on a mossy log as Greta sniffs around the periphery.
Above me, something dangles from a branch -- full and round
and yellow.
      I am little, and he has just finished planting a lemon
tree in our backyard. I want to make lemonade, but there
isn’t any fruit because the tree is just a baby. How
long will it take to grow one? I ask. A while, he tells me.
I’ll wait, I say. He comes over and takes my hand.
Come on, grilla, he says. If we’re going to sit here
that long, we’d better get something to eat.
      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 can bear our climate, where we have not only
White Christmases but also White Halloweens. I reach into
the tree and pull down the yellow ball: a crumbling sphere
made of birdseed and suet.
      What does grilla mean?
      
– – – – – – –
      The next morning, I drive to the senior center. As I
walk into the dining hall, I see Evelyn Gadzinski moving
down the buffet table, squirreling food into her purse. When
she notices me, she smiles. “Oh, Delia. How’s
the wedding coming, dear?”
      “ Fine.” She grabs and handful of sugar
packets and stuffs them into her handbag right in front of
me. “Are you going to pass up the yogurt?” I
ask.
      She lifts the spoon, considers it, and sighs.
“It’s too hard to clean the leather.”
      “ Is there a reason you’re hoarding
food?”
      “ Well, of course,” Mrs. Gadzinski says.
She takes a book out of her purse, one with a mummy –
and some granola – on the cover. “These
Egyptians, they had it right. They got buried with enough to
last them until they got to the next life.”
      I shake my head. “You believe in
reincarnation?”
      “ Well, don’t you? As long as I’ve
known you, Delia -- since you were a little girl --
you’ve been trying to find your mother.” She
raises a brow. “I’m not saying I was Marie
Antoinette or Cleopatra, but do you seriously believe that
we only get one lifetime? Does that seem fair? Honey, life
is just the place where the thread manages to pick up the
fabric. You do it over and over, long enough, and sooner or
later you wind up with a continuous seam.”
      I make a mental note to tell my father to keep a
closer eye on Evelyn Gadzinski. But even as I’m
thinking this, I’m wondering if she might be right.
I’m thinking about that lemon tree. I lower my voice.
“Did you ever see something from… before?”
      Before she can answer, I hear my father call my name.
“Delia! What are you doing here?”
      I fish his wallet out of my pocket. “You left
this in my car. I thought you might miss it. And then I got
sidelined by a philosophical discussion.”
      He steers me out of the cafeteria and into his office.
“Did she get to the part where her cat was abducted by
aliens?”
      “ Not yet.”
      “ Well.” He smiles. “That’s
actually pretty interesting.”
      I sit down in the chair across from his desk.
“She sort of has a point,” I say. “Maybe
that’s what a déjà vu is – you
remember something you’ve done before, in a different
life. Didn’t you ever wonder if you’d see Mom
again?”
      My father folds his hands across his stomach.
“This is what I think: Mrs. Gadzinski is a lovely
woman who takes Prilosec, Norvasc, and a hefty dose of
Zoloft. It’s a wonder she remembers this life, much
less the ones she’s lived before.”
      “Dad?” I ask. “Did we ever plant a
lemon tree?”
      He doesn’t hear me, though, because he’s
bent over and reaching into his desk. “Hey, I’ve
got something for you.”
      He opens his hand and spills a pearl necklace into my
palm. They he leads me toward the mirror that hangs behind
his office door. “They were hers,” he says, and
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 home.
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. “Hey,” I say. “You promised
to lay a trail for us.”
      The dog bounds into the office and nearly climbs onto
Fitz’s lap. He rubs her behind the ears, and she
snuggles closer to him, knocking several photos off his
desk.
      I bend down to pick them up. In one, there is 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, who
has double pupils dancing in each of his eyes. I hand the
snapshots back to Fitz. “Relatives?” I ask.
      “ The Gazette’s forcing 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. I also got to read a 1911 medical
treatise from a doctor who had an eleven-year-old patient
come to him with an ache in his arch. Turns out the kid had
a molar growing out of the bottom of his foot.”
      “ Oh, come on. 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. “Hey, have I always been afraid
of spiders?”
      “ For as long as I’ve known you. 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 with pebbles
around it instead of soil.. How I could read the letters
ABC, on the bottoms of my shoes.
      Fitz listens carefully, his arms folded across his
chest. “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 are traumatic.
What’s traumatic about citrus fruit?”
      “ I’ll have to get back to you on
that,” Fitz laughs, and he reaches 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 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, and Greta turned in a circle,
whining. Then she lay down, and put 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.
      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
a photo I saw the previous night. 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. She
trains the dog to step on the domed plastic of the Trouble
game, press down 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, but I have told Sophie that this
is Her Time – a consolation prize for missing the tea
party at school. The answering machine comes on, and then
Fitz’s voice. “Delia, pick up. I have to talk to
you.”
      I reach for the phone, but Sophie gets there more
quickly and punches the disconnect button. “You
promised,” she says, but 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 headed for the front door. Several
neighbors stand on their porches, watching.
      Everything inside me goes to stone. If I open up that
door, I will only 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.
      I sit very still with my arms crossed over my chest. I
do this to keep from flying apart. The doorbell rings, and I
hear Sophie turning the knob.
      “ Is your mom home?” 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 says evenly.
      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 be
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
you could 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.