Three Ways to Disappear

by Katy Yocom

  “I’m sorry it’s taken this long to call you. We couldn’t find your number.” Geeta’s voice rasps with fatigue. “Mrs. Chamberlain, I should tell you that a tigress was with Sarah’s body when she was found.”

  Quinn sucks in her breath. Don’t picture it, she commands herself.

  “It’s not what you think,” Geeta says. “The police aren’t treating this as a tiger accident.”

  She understands the implication but can’t say it aloud. She is too engulfed in the only news that matters. When they hang up, she looks into Pete’s face. “Sarah,” she manages, though he already knows.

  He whispers, “I’m so sorry.”

  They say a country goes strangely quiet before an earthquake, and that’s how Quinn feels, that something terrible is coming, but for now there is just this quiet place where she’s been thrust, waiting. She had been with Sarah just weeks ago, a heartbeat of time. They’d become sisters again. And now: gone, all of it. Stolen.

  She remembers the day Sarah told her she was going back to India. She remembers her response: All right, you. Go save those tigers.

  This is how we fail each other, she thinks. We try to love the best way we know how. The day she’d said those words, Quinn thought she was being kind.

  Down the darkened hallway, the children sleep quietly, their bodies perfect and unbruised. Alaina’s breath whispers as Quinn bends down and gathers her in her arms. She mumbles, “Mommy, what’s happening?” and Quinn says, “Shh, you’re going to sleep in our bed tonight,” and Alaina asks, “Why?” and Quinn can’t answer.

  Pete stands in the doorway, and she asks him, “Get Nick?” and he says, “Quinn,” but she asks him again with her eyes, and his face tells her he’ll do whatever she needs him to do. He hefts their son and murmurs reassurance when Nick wakes up. They settle the twins into the bed between them, and across their children’s breathing bodies she and Pete lie facing each other, arms stretched out, touching each other’s shoulders, rubbing their hands over that warm, known skin for reassurance. In the gray darkness she can just see that his eyes are open. For a time she watches him watch her. But the news is still unreal, and she’s not ready for his gaze. So she closes her eyes and tells herself, Sarah is dead, but it feels like a lie. And she tries to rehearse an answer for the question the twins will ask: Why did she have to die? But she can think of no answer at all.

  Alaina sighs and flings her arm above her head, knocking Quinn’s cheek with the back of her hand. Nick kicks out and catches Alaina in the leg, and she makes a little cry of protest. Before long the twins are engaged in a slow-motion, somnolent fight, limbs lifting and landing heavily. They are eight years old. Eight, the end of real childhood. Their bodies are poised to change. They’re used to their own beds, and the feel of being surrounded makes them rebel. She bears the blows and thinks, I have my twins. I have my twins.

  And she thinks: Mother.

  .

  When Mother opens the door, wrapped tight in her blue silk dressing gown, Quinn can manage only to say her sister’s name, but it’s enough. Mother crosses her arms over her abdomen and bends forward, wrapping herself around the emptiness where her babies were formed. The sound she makes is low and loud. Her mouth stretches open around it.

  Quinn brings Mother to her house and leads her to the kitchen table, where she sits and stares at nothing. She must be thinking of her three shining children, of everything she poured into making them; birthing them; raising, teaching, loving them. Where did all that love, all that energy, go when they died? Was it just lost?

  And what is the word for being the last child left alive? Not orphan. But something like it.

  Quinn and Pete sit their children down at the table and tell them Auntie Sarah is dead. The twins’ faces change at the news. This is the end of their childhood, although they don’t know it yet. And it enrages Quinn; it sickens her. She doesn’t want them to have to live through what she did. She doesn’t want them to watch their family disappear, piece by piece.

  .

  Night falls, but she cannot sleep. And she refuses to meditate. She has no interest in accepting anything right now.

  The light in her studio stabs her eyes. There’s a primed canvas on her easel, and she grabs for a tube of cobalt. She uses her palette knife to shove the pigment up and down, blotting out everything. Tonight she rejects all white.

  She opens a tube of ultramarine and buries a new canvas in it, using her stiffest brush to apply the pigment thick as clay. Next she switches to orange for tigers, and when that’s gone, to black, reveling bitterly in the pigment’s thick oiliness, the way it gives back nothing at all.

  But this is all going too fast, and the night is dishwater yellow outside her window. Morning is far away. She never expected Sarah to die in India. She thought she’d be safe there, after all her years traveling the world. She thought her sister had settled down.

  She picks up a half-spent tube of burnt sienna and stares at it, then retrieves her smallest brush and some water to thin the paint.

  Henna tattoos are for weddings, but the patterns are intricate and organic—tiny leaves, flowers, vines—and they take hours of careful attention. By the time Pete finds her in the morning, she has painted her entire left hand, front and back, and her arm up to the elbow.

  He studies her there, sitting on the strewn floor, staring hypnotized at her own hand. “You didn’t sleep,” he says. She shakes her head.

  He kneels beside her, tucks his chin into the crook of her neck. Places a kiss just below her ear and whispers, “I know. I know.” And she loves him for that, even though he doesn’t know, and she hopes to God he never will.

  .

  William meets her at the station in Sawai and lets her into her sister’s apartment, where she spends the night in Sarah’s bed, lying awake and trying to open herself to any filament of energy that might remain.

  In the morning, he brings her the obituary from the Times of India. The lead paragraph refers to Sarah, as she knew it would, as “Tiger Woman” and weaves the expected tale. She was, depending on whose viewpoint you subscribe to, a mystic, a human/tiger hybrid, the Dian Fossey of the tiger world; or a typical American, foolhardy, sentimental, with enough money in her bank account to follow her fancies no matter the cost to herself or the Indian government or the tigers she so mawkishly adored.

  The obituary mentions the tabloid stories. Tiger Woman Stalks Villagers. Tiger Woman Caught on Film Nursing Litter of Cubs. Tiger Woman Rescues Baby from Flood. And a drawing of a feline figure with a human face, carrying a dark-haired infant by the scruff of its neck.

  Quinn sets the paper aside and looks up at William.

  “A few days ago, I looked through my records.” He pulls a small green notebook out of his shirt pocket, flips it open, puts on his reading glasses. “In the months before Sarah’s arrival, we sighted a tiger on average one day out of seven. But on the days she accompanied us, it was one out of two, and then, in that last month, it was nearly every time.” He removes his glasses. “You expect an increase in sightings during the dry season, as animals hew closer to the water holes. But even so, her percentages were extraordinary. Hari once told me she was blessed by Durga. Sanjay suspected pheromones. I told myself it was coincidence, remarkable luck.”

  In the tree outside Sarah’s window, a whirring of feathers. “But I think now it was simply the fact that she drew animals to her. We know that that phenomenon exists. The fact that science hasn’t yet explained it doesn’t make it untrue. So I believe it comes down to this. The tigers came out for Sarah because she was Sarah.” He looks closely at Quinn. “Do you see what I’m saying? It was the tigers who made her Tiger Woman.”

  .

  It’s a small service, held in the park, in a meadow near the ranger station. Sanjay, arm in a sling and eyes burning in their sockets, looks as if he can barely stand. Hari tells Quinn his boys have be
en mourning Sarah; they considered her a friend.

  The park director and a handful of forest guards attend. The ambassador from Delhi, seeming out of place in his stylish charcoal suit. The women of the collective in brightly colored lehenga choli. Sarah’s landlord and his family. Reporters and television crews. Quinn asks the media crews to respect their privacy and, astonishingly, they pack up their equipment and leave.

  The service takes place beneath a clear blue sky. A light breeze rustles the dry grass and blows songbirds from tree to tree. As they eulogize her sister, Quinn can’t stop thinking about the other service, the one for their brother. How it rained that day in Delhi. How Mother clutched Quinn to her like a pocketbook.

  Afterward, the women of the collective gather, talking intently and looking at Quinn from a short distance away. They approach her, and Anju offers condolences on behalf of the group, adding, “We should be happy. She achieved moksha.” Sanjay barely manages to choke out the translation.

  Rohini turns to Sanjay and asks, “What happens now?”

  “I don’t know,” he admits. “This was her project.”

  “You’ve always been an equal part of it,” Anju argues.

  “Look, we’re very-very sad about Sarah,” Rohini says. “She was our friend. But we’ve got families to feed. We all need the income. Padma-ji is about to get her house back. Nuri will have a place to live.” She nods toward Quinn. “Why can’t she help?”

  Quinn explains that she lives eight thousand miles away. The women are undaunted by that fact. The conversation ends with no promises. Quinn knows what she needs to do, but she is too flattened by grief to make the commitment yet. The women turn away, and someone official hands Quinn a small, flimsy cardboard box, heavy for its size.

  It’s shocking how little remains of the body after cremation: a heap of pale, sandy bone you could hold in two cupped palms. Quinn carefully shakes half of the ashes into a bronze urn for Mother and closes the box on the rest. Hari drives Quinn and Geeta, William and Sanjay into the park’s tawny interior, where they scatter Sarah’s ashes in the dry, stony bed of the river where once she rescued a tiger cub.

  .

  That night, William invites Quinn to eat with him. She brings the Sundarbans mask, and he places it on the table, a silent dinner guest. When they finish the meal and the washing up, she turns to face him and rests her hips against the speckled yellow countertop, and he looks at her standing in this posture, and she can see she’s reminding him of Sarah. He picks up the mask. “It was meant as protection from threats that stalk from behind,” he says. “But it wasn’t the past stalking her, it turns out.”

  Quinn is not so sure. Lately she has begun to think of the past as a vast place, dark and mysterious as a forest. Always decaying, collapsing in upon itself, only to bring forth new growth in the most surprising of places. She thinks of Mother, of Ayah. In those last months before Sarah’s death, Quinn began to see that the past is a place we think belongs to us, but we are wrong. We are only ever visitors there.

  Maybe she would have recognized that truth long ago if she and Sarah had not lost each other for so many years.

  William’s pale blue eyes shine with tears. “She didn’t have to die.”

  “Sanjay needs your friendship,” she says. “Even if you’re angry with him.”

  “I loved her, too. I never told her that.” A jagged laugh catches in his throat. “Brave of me, isn’t it, to tell you this now that it’s too late for it to mean anything.”

  “You gave her that mask, William,” she says. “She knew.”

  .

  For three days, she dogs the police commissioner. He tells her repeatedly that his men are doing everything they can, which seems to mean interviewing villagers. She makes Geeta and William and Sanjay recount their memories of that day in minute detail. She invites Drupti to dinner at Sanjay’s brother-in-law’s restaurant, as if being there, and possibly seeing him, will tell her anything. Tarun, tall and leonine, comes to their table in his French-cuffed shirt and ruby cufflinks to offer condolences and pick up the tab. In other words, to let Quinn know he knows who she is.

  From Sarah’s flat the next morning, she calls the embassy and ends up speaking with a foreign service officer she’s never met. She tells him about her encounter with Tarun. His voice goes tight with alarm. He advises her in the strongest possible terms—that’s the actual phrase he uses—to avoid contact with anyone involved in the case. He tells her she should leave this matter with the embassy. He strongly urges her to return to the States.

  After she hangs up, Geeta arrives with a copy of the Times of India. “Have you seen it?” They sit at the dining room table while Quinn reads the story, the terra cotta tiles cold against her feet.

  EVEN IN DEATH, MYTH OF TIGER WOMAN LIVES ON

  By Anjali Ghosh

  SAWAI MADHOPUR, RAJASTHAN, January 24—Two weeks ago, Sarah DeVaughan, known internationally as “Tiger Woman,” was killed while heroically protecting tigers during an uprising in Ranthambore National Park. But whispers in the surrounding villages suggest her myth did not die with her.

  DeVaughan gained fame last summer when footage of her tiger-cub river rescue went public. But in nearby villages, her notoriety took on a different flavor. After the incident, a variety of rumors cropped up, including one linking the Tiger Woman to a tiger lover. Legends of shape-shifting tigers are common among tribal communities throughout India.

  The latest rumor arose from an incident that occurred Tuesday, when a would-be poacher fell from a cliff while attempting to set a snare trap inside the park. The poacher, who broke both legs in the fall, is said to have seen a mysterious tiger with an unusually fair coat—similar to DeVaughan’s blond hair—and a humanlike face vanishing into the forest just before he fell.

  It is not clear where the rumor originated. But in the villages surrounding Ranthambore, people are saying the ghost of the Tiger Woman is afoot, working in death as she did in life to protect the tigers of the park.

  She looks up at Geeta. “People really believe this kind of thing?”

  “In the villages, yes.”

  Quinn nearly smiles. “I think Sarah would have loved it.”

  Geeta crosses her forearms on the table. “I’ll tell you, I don’t have much confidence that Sarah’s death is going to receive more police scrutiny. No one has come forward with any information, and trust me, they won’t. The villagers protect their own.”

  “You think it was a villager,” Quinn says. “I keep coming back to Sanjay’s brother-in-law.”

  “It’s true he’s a bit of a tough,” Geeta says. “But I can’t imagine he was in the park that day.”

  “So what do you want me to do?” Quinn asks. “Either way. Tarun or one of the villagers. Should I say it’s okay that the man who killed my sister gets to live out the rest of his life in peace?”

  Geeta ignores her tone, and for that matter, her question. “Look, I have to ask. Are you planning to bring suit against Tiger Survival?”

  “What?”

  “As director of this agency, I hired Sarah. I’m the reason she came to Ranthambore, and, to that extent, I’m the reason she ended up dying here.”

  Quinn can hardly speak. “You think I’ve come here to sue you?”

  “Please remember I barely know you. I can’t afford to make assumptions about what’s motivated you to come back here.”

  That word, afford, enrages Quinn. “My sister is dead. What’s your stake in this?”

  “Tiger survival,” Geeta says.

  Quinn cannot manage to speak.

  After a wordless interval, Geeta clears her throat. “I apologize for upsetting you. But you must prepare yourself for the fact you may not find what you’re looking for.”

  Quinn squeezes her eyes shut. “All right. You’re dying to tell me what to do. So say it.”

 
Geeta’s face holds not smugness but regret. “Go home, Quinn. You’ll not find justice here.”

  .

  The next morning, word comes from the chief of police that Mandeep, Padma’s brother-in-law, has been arrested for Sarah’s murder.

  “A Vinyal man. It doesn’t surprise me,” the police chief says. “Vinyal is a very rough place.”

  .

  Quinn arrives in Louisville exhausted and sleeps for the better part of two days. On the third day, she wakes to snow, a couple of inches on the ground and more floating down from a white sky.

  After Pete and the twins leave for school, Mother calls and asks if she can come by. Quinn can hear in her voice that she has something to say. When she arrives, Quinn takes her coat as Mother smooths snowflakes from her hair.

  Outside the window, snow gathers in the bark on the north side of the walnut tree. “I would like so much to believe in some sort of afterlife,” Quinn says. “Heaven. Reincarnation. Moksha. I would love that comfort.”

  “So you don’t believe she has an afterlife, then.”

  But Quinn does believe it. Sarah is still alive because they love her: Quinn and Mother, Sanjay and William, Pete and the kids. And because halfway around the world, women are selling textiles for a living wage, thanks to Sarah. And because there are people in the villages who believe her spirit is still alive, guarding the tigers of Ranthambore. Burning bright.

  “I’m glad you girls reconnected.”

  “I’m sorry we waited so long.”

  “I should have been different with her,” Mother says. “I should have found a way.”

  Quinn looks at her straight on. “It felt like you left us after Marcus died. We never got you back.”

  Mother blinks and composes herself and says, “I’ll tell you what happened that day, if you still want to know. But it’s not going to make you any happier. So you have to ask yourself whether you want this information, because it will be a burden to you.”