Three Ways to Disappear

by Katy Yocom

  “Why would people read it if they know the stories are lies?” Nick asked.

  “Good question. I guess to some people, those stories make good entertainment.”

  “They shouldn’t make stuff up about people.”

  “I agree,” Quinn said.

  They watched the tiger-rescue video together, the twins excitedly narrating, and then it was time to get down to business. The twins watched silently as Jane showed Quinn the bags she carried. “Tell Sarah to make sure they use colorfast dyes. They might have to order the dyes from Jaipur or somewhere. Once the women have produced some samples, have your sister send them over, and I’ll check them out.” She looked up. “It might take a few tries before they get the quality up to a level I can sell.”

  “I’ll let her know,” Quinn said.

  “Tell them not to get discouraged. They’ll get there. And when they do, I’ll stock some of their products in the store and put them up on my website.”

  They talked about pricing, the cost of materials, labor and shipping. Quinn bought six bags to send as samples.

  “How come it’s legal to kill animals?” Nick asked as Jane bagged up the purchases. The twins had discovered a bin of felted-wool finger puppets and had placed little animals on all their fingers.

  “Well,” Quinn said, “for one thing, people eat them.”

  “Yuck.”

  “You like chicken, don’t you? That’s an animal.”

  Alaina wiggled the chicken puppet on her index finger and made it ask, “Is pizza made from animals?”

  “Pepperoni is. It’s made from pigs.”

  “You see where this is going, don’t you?” Jane asked.

  “I figured I had another year or so before they decided to go vegetarian.” She considered her children. “This is going to make dinners complicated.”

  “Freezer aisle.” Jane handed Quinn her bags. “You won’t believe how many fake chicken products you can find.”

  At home, Quinn found a box for shipping the handbags and set it by the back door. Then she dug out the credit-line checkbook. Helen DeVaughan, she wrote on the Pay To line. Pete could convince himself that they didn’t have plenty, but he was comparing their finances to the founders of the start-up where he worked, guys with seven-figure portfolios and expensive new houses. It skewed his perspective; it made him consider their bungalow life more modest than it really was.

  She wrote a dollar amount and signed the check. Yes, Mother spent unwisely. But given the choice, Quinn would err on the side of generosity.

  And anyway, chances were good that Pete would never find out. He pretty much left the banking to her.

  Sarah

  “One more after today,” Sanjay said as they walked past the hospital’s sliding doors. “And then you’re through.”

  “It can’t come soon enough for me,” Sarah said.

  “You Americans,” Sanjay tut-tutted. “So impatient.” He wore a little grin, like the one he’d given her the first couple of times they’d met.

  I’ll be damned, Sarah thought. He finally wants to play.

  “You Indians,” she said. “Not impatient enough.”

  “All right, then. You Americans, getting married and divorced at the drop of a hat.”

  She glanced at him. She wasn’t sure what he knew of her history, or what he’d guessed. “You Indians, who marry people you don’t even know.”

  He twitched, as if she’d touched a nerve. “Colonizer,” he muttered, just loud enough for her to hear.

  “I believe you’re thinking of William.”

  “You’re right. The bastard.”

  Sarah laughed aloud.

  They had the waiting room nearly to themselves, aside from a young mother with a sleeping baby and a thin old farmer with a bandaged hand. Safe to say neither spoke English. Sanjay settled next to her. “It’s not so terrible, arranged marriage,” he said. “In your country, everyone wants a love marriage. And look how many end up divorced. Fifty percent.”

  A love marriage. She’d thought she had one with Rob. “I took it as a lesson,” she said. “A long, painful, expensive lesson.”

  She hadn’t told him before now that she was divorced. She thought he might apologize for bringing up something so personal. Instead he asked, “And what did you learn?”

  “That what looks like safety isn’t always.”

  “Safety? It’s not a concept I associate with you.”

  “Why? Because I fall into rivers with tigers?” She shrugged. “At the time, I wouldn’t have said I was looking for safety. I would have just told you I’d found someone mature and thoughtful, unlike the men I crossed paths with in my job.”

  “But later you realized you didn’t want a mature, thoughtful man after all.” He nodded sagely. She laughed and swatted his arm, and she saw him take note of that swat. Very familiar.

  Across the room, the baby stirred. The mother began walking the infant around the room, bouncing softly on the balls of her feet. “Let’s just say what I thought was maturity turned out to be something more like … how to say this nicely? Complacency. Lack of passion.”

  “Of all the people in the world, I can’t see you with a dull man.”

  “You notice I’m not with him anymore.”

  “But the journalists you worked with. They were too … ?”

  “Hooked on adrenaline.” She grinned. “They were fun, I’ll admit that. But they were all reaction.”

  “Indians try to be careful,” he said. “We do a lot to make sure the match is right. We compare horoscopes, arrange family meetings … ”

  “You look down on love marriages.”

  Again with the side-to-side headshake, a movement she’d begun to recognize as noncommittal. “They’re considered less than respectable.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s better to marry a stranger.”

  “It’s better to be practical. Passion doesn’t last. We pay attention to the things that will.”

  She turned to face him. “Name them.”

  He grinned at her. “You think I can’t? As a matter of fact, I have a theory about this.”

  “Do tell, Professor Prakash.”

  Something crossed his face, and she remembered that his father had been a professor. A nurse came to the doorway and called a name, and the farmer with the bandaged hand stood and followed her.

  “First let me tell you a theory you’ll hear from a lot of men in this country. The thinking goes that there are four criteria. If you’re going to marry someone”—he held up his hand and ticked the items off on his fingers as he spoke—“she should be from the same state as you are, and from the same caste, and your parents should like her, and you should like her as well. What are you smiling about?”

  “Nothing.” She was smiling because his chatty side was reemerging from wherever he’d hidden it all these months. “Why those four things?”

  “To begin with, in India, the states are like different countries. Different languages, customs, everything. The thinking is that cross-cultural relationships are too difficult ninety percent of the time, so you need to start from the same ground, literally. Second: What these guys will tell you is that if her family is from a higher caste, she’s probably accustomed to things you can’t provide her, and if she’s from a lower caste, she might embarrass you with the way she speaks or behaves.” He paused. “These are not exactly forward-thinking theories, you understand.”

  “Plenty of people think the same way where I come from,” she said. “Even without castes, we still have class issues.”

  “Third. In India the parents usually live with the eldest son. If you bring home a wife they don’t like? Big uproar. Everyone’s unhappy. And fourth—simply that if you’re going to marry her, you may as well like her.”

  “Wow,” Sarah said. “Th
at’s quite a rubric. So what’s your theory?”

  “To me it’s all about the family,” he said. “It’s perfectly possible to get past the state differences. And the caste stipulation just perpetuates a problem that’s plagued this country forever.”

  “Americans can’t fathom the idea of an arranged marriage,” Sarah said.

  He smiled. “You’re so romantic, and so completely bad at marriage. You don’t see that in yourselves—that’s what’s astonishing. Nobody ever looks at the divorce rate and says, ‘Perhaps I should rethink this.’”

  The nurse called Sarah’s name. “Hold that thought,” she said and stepped back into the ward for the dreaded shot. The needle stick was nothing, but the serum rolled through her in a cold, nauseating wave.

  On the way back to her flat, she thought of half a dozen things she wanted to say, but they’d taken his motorbike, and the wind wouldn’t allow it. When they got to her building, she invited him up to continue the conversation. If his friendly side showed itself this rarely, she wanted to take advantage of it.

  Her mind sparked away as she filled their teacups. They settled at either end of the sofa in her front room, beneath the niche.

  “Tell me about that one.” He pointed to the photo of two brown boys, their serious faces turned up to the sky.

  She glanced at the image. “What do you think it’s about? I’m curious.”

  “They’re two boys in trouble, praying for help.”

  “That about sums it up. They’re boy soldiers. They’ve just surrendered.”

  “You captured it very well.”

  “Photos are tricky, though,” she said. “They always tell a story, but they don’t always tell the story you think they’re going to. Even a totally unaltered documentary photograph can lie.”

  “How do you mean?”

  She blew on her tea, sending up a cloud of white steam. “When you break down a situation into a sequence of isolated moments, certain moments reflect the truth, if you want to call it that, and others just don’t. It’s like, if you snap a picture of a person blinking, it might look like they’re asleep, but they’re not. And what you leave out of the frame can completely change the narrative. I could take a picture of two kids running, and you might think they’re having a race. But just outside of the frame, maybe there’s a tiger chasing them. Or maybe they’re chasing after another kid they want to catch and beat up.”

  “Naughty boys.”

  She laughed. “And then there’s what the viewer brings to the image. Everyone who looks at a photo makes up a story about it. Like you just did.” She sipped her tea. “But here’s what I can’t fathom. Extended families living together. No privacy, no independence.”

  “Here’s what I can’t understand about Westerners,” he said. “Everybody living alone. Nobody to talk to. Nobody to help you out with the things you can’t do for yourself. It seems a terribly lonely way to live.”

  She looked at him. Sanjay lived alone, she was sure of it. They had stopped by his apartment on the way to the park one day, and she and William had waited in the front room while Sanjay got something from his bedroom. Every item in sight was recognizably his.

  “At any rate,” he said. “Yes, we have to put up with a lack of privacy, but we make it work. Look at our divorce rate. Ten, fifteen percent.”

  “Is that because everybody’s so blissfully happy in their marriages?”

  “Divorce isn’t accepted here. Actually—” He paused. “If I were in your country, I would be divorced.”

  “What makes you say that? You might find some nice woman and live happily ever after.”

  “You misunderstand me. I mean I’d be divorced from my wife.”

  She looked at him, confused.

  “We married seven years ago,” he said. “After three years, she didn’t want to be together anymore. She moved back to her parents’ home.”

  “But you didn’t divorce?”

  “She refused.” In a few sentences, he sketched the story. Three miscarriages. Mounting tension in the household. She had pushed him away after the third lost pregnancy, then left altogether. His parents died in a car crash the following year.

  They sat in silence after he finished. “I haven’t told the story outright in a long time,” he said. “I’d forgotten how miserable it sounds.”

  “Why won’t she divorce you?”

  “Because it would be to her shame. She’d lose status, and she’d never find another husband. No Indian man would marry a divorced woman.”

  She set down her teacup, pulled her feet up onto the sofa, and wrapped her arms around her knees. “So where does that leave you?”

  He spread his arms as if to say, Right here. Just what you see.

  “Because no woman would get involved with a man who couldn’t marry her,” she guessed.

  “More or less. I’ve managed to date a bit here and there, but it’s always limited.”

  “And if you were divorced? Could you marry again?”

  “Possibly. But it doesn’t matter. I’m not divorced, so it’s out of the question.”

  She bit her thumbnail in silence. “What’s her name?”

  “Lakshmi.”

  “I’m really mad at her for doing that to you.”

  “She’s not a bad person. It just got to be too much. She was grieving, and I was, too. You’d think we would have been a comfort to each other, but we weren’t. We made it harder for each other.” He paused. “I’m not proud of that time in my life. I think leaving was her way of trying to move on.” He looked at her. “You actually remind me of her a bit. Strong. Full of opinions.”

  She smiled. “Do you ever see her?”

  “Not often. She seems to have a good life. She works as a bookkeeper in her brother’s restaurant, and I help her a bit financially. She has friends, does things around town.” He picked up his teacup but didn’t drink. “Really, the same is true for me. It’s not what I pictured for my life, but I have good companions in Geeta Ma’am and William-ji and now you. That helps.”

  “And you have those boys,” she said. “The ones you took to the cinema. I saw you with them, across the lobby. They’re your nephews?”

  “They’re Hari’s sons. I’m an uncle to them, you could say.” He paused. “You should have said hello. I would have introduced you.”

  “I didn’t want to intrude.” She could still picture how happy they’d looked that day, how comfortable with one another. “You created for yourself what life denied you. You didn’t just accept your fate.”

  He smiled. “I think you just called me a bad Indian.”

  She blushed and covered her face with her hands. “You’re right. How awful. I’m sorry.”

  “No. It’s true. I’m a terrible Indian. I don’t accept my fate. I don’t accept what’s happening to the tiger. I don’t accept that those boys and for that matter hundreds of millions of people should live in extreme poverty while the lucky few live in even more extreme luxury. I don’t accept that people should be consigned to their fate because of the family they were born to. I want to change all of it. But there’s so little one person can do. Sometimes nothing.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” she said. “There’s never nothing.”

  “I suppose that’s why we’re both here.”

  “To be of use. Even if it’s not enough.” She sat thinking for a moment. “Do you look down on me for being divorced?”

  He laughed. “Let me tell you, Sarah, I envy you. How do I say this? My situation has made me less judgmental than I used to be. And your culture is different. When you go back to America, you’ll find a good man to marry you.”

  She picked up her cup and stared into the tea leaves as if she could read something there. “I had another tiger dream the other night. I was following it through the fog, but it was different this time.
We were walking down a street with houses. It led me to an apartment building. Right up to one of the doors.” She fell silent.

  “What did the door look like?”

  “It was blue.” She looked into his eyes.

  “My door is blue,” he said carefully.

  “I know.” She climbed to her feet and held out her hand. “Here, let me take your cup. I’ll get you more tea.”

  He followed her into the kitchen, where she stood at the stove. He stepped toward her, and she turned to him and took his face in her hands. She kissed his mouth, and when she pulled away, a droplet of moisture clung to her lower lip. He wiped it away, and her lip gave like a little pillow beneath his thumb.

  He reached for her and pulled her body to his. She lifted the hem of his shirt and placed her hands on his warm bare skin, and he shuddered at her touch. She pressed her cheek to his and held still, drinking in the feel of him. He tugged her shirt up and let his hands slide across her waist and around to her back, and a current ran through them, she would swear it, moving fast and dark. And there was nothing to do in this moment except turn the lights off in the front room, pull the sofa cushions to the floor, and shed their clothing. There was nothing to do but lie still while he ran his fingers over her skin.

  They touched for hours, their hands everywhere, fingertips, open palms. They whispered to each other, the words silvery on their breath. He murmured into her ear, and his words feathered and hummed at the base of her spine. He slid his fingers inside her, and she let her head fall back as she pushed against him, his knuckles hitting her pubic bone in a rhythm that made her ache. He whispered to her: that he couldn’t believe her body, her skin so pliant and giving he almost couldn’t feel it, like running his fingertips over the surface of a bowl of milk. They fell asleep, their bodies spooned together, her breasts to his back. When they woke an hour before dawn, their mingled sweat soaked the cushions.

  He turned to face her. “My motorbike is still out front.”

  She nodded. “You should go.”

  He pulled back to look at her face. He ran a fingertip along her collarbone, around the curve of her breast. “Your skin,” he whispered. “It’s glowing.”