Vanishing

by Cai Emmons

  “Dan,” they all echo, raising their cups. But for the rap the room falls silent.

  “You all knew?”

  They shrug.

  “Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m sixty-four. . . .” The line is stuck in her brain as she drives north because Lila has been singing it to her on the phone for the last couple of weeks. Talmadge never liked that song in the first place.

  The drive to Tim and Lila’s takes only an hour and a half, but it is mid-afternoon by the time Talmadge arrives because she dragged her feet, stayed in bed forever, drank coffee forever, took forever to throw a few things in an overnight bag. She considered canceling on the grounds of joylessness, but Lila would never understand.

  By the time it was dark last night and the moon began to show, she was the only one in the office. They’d all left as a group after forty-five minutes. Dan volunteered to help clean up, but she forbade him and he didn’t protest. It was clear he had plans to continue his celebration elsewhere. Whether the others went with him, she has no idea. She ferried all the leftover food and cake to the dumpster in the alley. She popped all the balloons, the helium in them still strong enough for a good Donald Duck session. She yanked down the streamers leaving bits of paper and tape still freckling the ceiling. The remaining two champagne bottles she put in Dan’s cubicle. She couldn’t stand going home, so she sat in her office with the lights off waiting for the moon to appear, blaming Adrian, who she knew was blameless. The moon finally appeared in her window, taking center stage, tumescent and white. A sound emerged from her larynx that was too meek to be called a howl.

  This day, Saturday, is punishingly beautiful, a perfect spring day, aggressively sunny, warmer than it has been of late, and animated with everyone’s bustling intentions. Her only intention is to endure this next so-called celebration.

  Lila prances from the house before Talmadge has even turned off the engine. She is all decked out in party clothes: a hot pink dress from which cleavage drools, a wide gold cummerbund cinched over her plump mid-line. Beneath the dress’s mid-thigh hem the crepey flesh of her legs flutters with each stride. Her hair has been recently dyed brown with swaths of yellow-gold, then curled and teased over her forehead in the shape of a wary cobra, a style Talmadge has never seen before—the vogue in New Hampshire? Fringed gold earrings chitter and sway in the space between lobes and shoulders. The whole getup seems more extravagant than necessary for a family party.

  “Not bad for a 64-year-old broad, right?” she says before Talmadge has a chance to weigh in.

  “Stunning,” Talmadge says, a kind of truth. “But aren’t you dressed up kind of early?”

  “It’s my birthday the whole damn day. Come in. I have a surprise for you. Tim’s at work. He gets off at 5:00 and we’ll eat when he gets home.” She waits for Talmadge to retrieve her overnight bag and the wrapped present from the trunk, a Melitta coffee maker with a thermal carafe to replace the stained, cracked Mr. Coffee she’s been using for years.

  “You didn’t need to bring a present,” Lila exclaims.

  But of course she did.

  The surprise is in the kitchen, a hulking male in a powder-blue polyester suit jacket and a bad black dye job. “This is Ron, but I call him Prince,” Lila says, nestling her head onto his chest. “My amour. This is my daughter, Tallie.”

  Ron stands, winks at Talmadge and gives her a strong handshake, his eyes traveling her body unabashedly. “You don’t look much like your brother.”

  It’s true, she and Tim appear to be from different gene pools. Tim, at twenty-four, skinny and not tall for a man, is still in the process of becoming, whereas Talmadge, at forty, is substantial, a person already become. “If you’re wondering if we have the same father, we do.” It is unusual for Talmadge to want to claim kinship with Tim, but Ron, this prince, has that effect on her.

  “Prince is in insurance,” Lila says. “But I like to say he’s my insurance.”

  They exchange a look and a chuckle that forces Talmadge to look away. She excuses herself as quickly as she can to the spare room, which doubles as a laundry room, making privacy unpredictable. The dryer is running and with each rotation something metal—a zipper, a button—whaps. She supposes it’s good her mother has someone, even if he’s not permanent. She lies on the bed, feeling the pulse of recent humiliation and the subsequent sleeplessness, but napping here is out of the question.

  Ron, to Talmadge’s surprise, is making the meal, spaghetti and fried chicken. He asks Talmadge to make a salad. The two of them work side by side at the counter while Lila sits at the kitchen table with a glass of white wine, filing her nails. Ron has taken off his powder blue jacket to cook. His collared shirt, partway unbuttoned, is black, and he moves around the kitchen with an alpha swagger, knowing exactly where to locate pots and pans and seasonings.

  “He’s a keeper, isn’t he,” Lila says. “You know people think folks our age don’t have needs, but we do have needs, right Prince? And we’re attractive—maybe not to people of your age, but to each other, right Prince?”

  “She’s right.” He winks, first at Lila, then at Talmadge, as if he has separate running conversations with each of them.

  “Tallie doesn’t tell me about her love life and I don’t ask. It’s not a mother’s right to ask.”

  Tim arrives home from work after 5:00, as promised. He greets Talmadge as if he’s glad she’s here. She tries to be glad too. He cleans up, changes his shirt, and they sit down to eat, Ron and Lila at the head and foot of the table, Tim and Talmadge on each side across from one another as if they’re still kids. Each time Ron rises to get something, he slaps Tim’s shoulder or back.

  Tim, who has thickened she notices, has a surprise of his own. He’s just enrolled in school, two night classes at the community college. He thinks he wants to go into engineering, and the teacher of his math class says he has the chops. He beams at Talmadge just as he did as an entrancing four-year-old.

  “That’s great,” she says. “Really great.” Everywhere, the world bristles, tiny bundles of sparking intention.

  The coffee maker is a bust. Ron gave Lila the very same thing just yesterday, though a higher-end model, more bells and whistles, more expensive.

  “That piece of coffee-making machinery is a thing of beauty,” Ron says. “Perfect coffee. So much better than that piece of shit she had. I’m sure this one is good too—keep it for yourself. I know it’ll make you happy.”

  Tim knocks for his laundry just as she’s slid into bed. “I’ll be quick,” he says, pulling clothes from the dryer, back to her.

  “Aren’t you the cozy little family,” she says.

  He lays his laundry basket at the foot of her mattress. “He’s a good guy. And he makes Mom happy, which is something. A big thing, actually.”

  “I don’t suppose she’s still looking for a job. In case her prince doesn’t work out.”

  “Jeez, Tallie, she’s sixty-four, she’s done working. It’s my turn now.”

  “You’re okay with that?”

  He looks straight at her, a new habit. In the past he always looked away, even as recently as her last visit. He is no longer the devilish child embossed in her mind.

  “Sure, why not.”

  “The Levys?”

  “Forget them. We worked it out. That whole thing is history.”

  “If you say so. You guys need money?”

  “Naw, we’re good. My boss is helping me out with college and stuff. And Ron, he helps out too. Thanks though.” He starts out the door, then turns. “Hey, can’t you be happy for us?”

  She nods. “I am.”

  “Good.”

  “Course I am,” she says to his disappearing back, so quietly he might not hear.

  She intended to leave early but Ron has made pancakes and bacon and eggs, and he urges her to stay, and she stays so as not to c
ome off as a poor sport or a snob, or whatever. As a result, she doesn’t make it back to Somerville until mid-afternoon. The day is soggy and chilly, a rebuke to yesterday. The familiar Sunday afternoon melancholy pervades the saturated air, dread of the next day and all its inevitable setbacks, the certainty she will have to confront her own ineptitude. She unpacks and flops around the rooms, intending to clean but not having the verve.

  She perches in her kitchen’s easy chair staring at the inferior coffee maker still in its box, thinking of her boys, wondering who might be a candidate to fill Dan’s shoes. Adrian is out of the question, too aloof. Dave, the receptionist, is not the brightest light. Josh and Randy and Zeke are all great guys, but they don’t have Dan’s backbone, and she can’t see them as generators or even perpetuators of team spirit.

  Only when the moon appears, its fullness shaved by two nights, does the will to move arrive. She loads the coffee maker into her trunk. The neighborhood, home to many young families, is accusingly silent, her engine rude. GPS guides her to Jamaica Plain not far from the Arnold Arboretum. She circles for a parking place and finally finds one along the edge of the fenced Arboretum, a short walk from Dan’s. His neighborhood, too, is drowsy on a Sunday night. She humps the box through the silent streets like a criminal transporting stolen goods under cover of darkness. But no criminal in her right mind would choose to operate under such a bright moon.

  She stands on the sidewalk in front of his building and stares up at the lights on the second floor of his duplex. She has never been here before. She half expects him to appear at the window and spot her. He doesn’t, so she rings. A staircase leads up to his second-floor apartment. At the top, a closed door. The door opens and he looks down. When he sees her waving, he descends.

  “Hey there, stranger,” he says, more surprised than he was at the party.

  “I brought you something.” She points to the box on the stoop. “A coffee maker I got for my mother, but her boyfriend already got her the same one, a better model.”

  “Jeez. I’m flattered. Your mother’s cast-off.”

  “Since you’re birthday twins you have the right of first refusal.”

  A moment of silence passes. He looks down at the box. She looks at him.

  “I probably shouldn’t take it. I’m going to be moving in a couple of months. I’m kind of trying to offload stuff.”

  You can’t just pretend? He has left the door at the top of the stairs open and light jazz wends down, along with voices.

  “Nonstop celebrating?” she says.

  “Come on up.”

  “I’m going to get going.” She bends for the box.

  “Look, I know you’re pissed. I should have told you before. I shouldn’t have surprised you like that. My bad.”

  “It’s always temporary, Dan. I told you that when I hired you.”

  He nods. “But it was good. I liked it. It’s a great magazine and the stuff we did together, you know, it was all good.”

  Not good enough, apparently. Hiking the box to her chest, she turns to go, catching Adrian in her peripheral vision peering through the doorway at the top of the stairs. “What’s up, mate?” he calls down.

  She doesn’t wait to find out if he sees her, doesn’t wait to find out who else is up there who isn’t she. She speed-walks to the corner, box crushed to her chest. Huffing, she stops. She sets the box down. $89 worth of coffeemaker and still not the best. She crosses the street, disowning the box without a glance back. Someone will score. Someone is always scoring. A certain kind of person with a strong independent will who, instead of waiting for things to unfold, pounces. Even her erstwhile-loser brother has become a pouncer.

  She follows the iron fence of the arboretum, under the spill of moonlight. She’s glad she’s not bald. Tiny white petals from some early flowering tree litter the sidewalk. They’re probably beautiful if examined closely, no doubt delicate and perfectly shaped, but from her height they’re ordinary looking, even messy. Tiny as they are, they’re ephemeral, and she steps on them without remorse, the waning moonlight raining down without mercy. She imagines she’s already wearing the red leather jacket and absorbing the warm pulse of the creature whose skin it once was.

  Publication History

  “The Deed” was published in Arts and Letters: A Journal of Contemporary Culture

  “Vanishing” was published in TriQuarterly

  “Redhead” was published in The Santa Monica Review

  “Fat” was a finalist in the Missouri Review’s Jeffrey Smith’s Editor’s Prize Contest

  “Her Boys” was a finalist in Narrative Magazine’s Story

  Contest

  The Author

  Cai Emmons, winner of the 2018 Leapfrog Fiction Contest for Vanishing, is the author of the novels His Mother’s Son, The Stylist, and Weather Woman. A sequel to Weather Woman, Sinking Islands, is forthcoming in 2021. Before turning to fiction, Emmons was a dramatist. She has taught at various colleges and universities, most recently at the University of Oregon’s Creative Writing Program. She is now a full-time writer.