The Vanishing Expert

by David Movsesian

  Only later would she realize how wrong she’d been.

  When she first discussed her idea with James that October afternoon in his apartment, she understood James’s bemusement, and then his shock. It was the first time she’d spoken the words out loud, and hearing them for the first time, even she was surprised at the sound of them. Any reasonable person would be, she imagined. But she also knew James would be willing to hear her out, given his role in all of it; not just in what had already happened but in those events that had yet to unfold. She was less certain how her mother might react. Of course, that was irrelevant if James objected to her plan.

  Before she disclosed her plan, she felt compelled to explain why she’d struggled with the other options available to her. He was greatly relieved to hear that she’d rejected the idea of an abortion.

  When Christina explained to him that she wasn’t ready to be a wife and a mother, regardless of the man or the circumstances, he understood. Despite her remarks, he still felt compelled to remind her that he would have gladly married her, even knowing the scandal it would most certainly cause.

  When she exhausted what seemed to be the final option— adoption— James was confused.

  “So, if you’re not gonna keep the baby and you’re not gonna give it up, then what’s your plan?” he finally asked.

  “I only said I didn’t want to give it up to strangers,” Christina reminded him. “This way I wouldn’t have to.”

  “What way?” James asked.

  Christina smiled. “You’re a little slow, James. Let’s hope that skips a generation.” She could see by his sober expression that he was in no mood for her teasing, so she decided it was time to tell him everything. “Tell me something, James; if it was up to you, you’d want to keep this baby. Am I right?”

  “You know I would, but—“

  “And you are the father, so you should have a say in that,” she continued. “But like I said, I’m not ready to be a mother, and there’s no way you can raise a baby alone.”

  “I’m hoping you’re getting to your point pretty soon,” James said.

  “You’ll adopt the baby,” she finally suggested. “You and my mother.”

  James said nothing. He felt obliged to argue the point, if only to be the voice of reason in a conversation that seemed suddenly devoid of it, but the truth was the more he considered Christina’s proposal, realizing it was the only solution that would allow him to keep the child and to finally become a father, and to be with Jean, the less he wanted to argue with her.

  Christina initially took his silence as disapproval, so she continued needlessly making her argument. “Didn’t you just tell me a little while ago that you wanted to be with my mother and the only thing standing in the way was that she didn’t want to have a baby?”

  He looked at her skeptically. “See, you took that as meaning that she didn’t want to give birth to a baby,” James offered. “I assumed she meant she didn’t want to raise one.”

  “She might have,” Christina conceded. “But I don’t see how she can say no to this. It’s not like she’s adopting some stranger’s baby. This is her flesh and blood.”

  There was something Christina was leaving out, and James was only beginning to realize what it was, and that the omission was no accident.

  “You’re forgetting one little thing,” he said. “How do you think she’s gonna feel when she finds out that I’m the father? I don’t see that going well.”

  Christina’s expression went suddenly dark. It was the last piece of the puzzle; the one secret she knew the two of them would have to keep forever. “That’s the catch, James,” Christina said after a long silence. “She can never know.

  In the autumn, Jean closed the gallery at six o’clock on Saturdays. Even though the long Columbus Day weekend had passed, marking the official end of the tourist season in the many coastal towns that catered to the ‘summer complaints’ (as Mainers sometimes referred to visitors from away), there would still be tourists in Bar Harbor until the end of October when the chill that settled upon the island made the long drive there less appealing. Most of those who visited in October were leaf peepers, some with their families in tow and some without. Those with children generally paid little regard to the Berkhardt Gallery, choosing instead to visit the tee shirt and souvenir shops or the Chocolate Emporium on Main Street, all of which catered more to the interests of the younger visitors. A good many of those couples who visited Bar Harbor without children usually found their way into the gallery on those crisp fall days. So Jean was in no great rush to close for the season. Winter was long enough in Maine; there was no need to hasten it by declaring an end to the tourist season any sooner than necessary.

  When Christina was younger, Saturdays had been the day when she would join her mother in the shop, mostly to keep her company on those long quiet October days, like this one, when there were often long stretches between customers. It was their chance to catch up and bond after having spent so much of their week apart, and they relished those afternoons— Jean even more than her daughter— when they passed the time talking about school and boys and any subject that was of interest to Christina. It was all interesting to Jean.

  Particularly during those first years after Richard left, Jean wanted desperately to assure her daughter that, despite her father’s absence, she was still loved; that unlike Richard, she would never leave. But even Jean would have admitted that those afternoons were as much for her as they were for Christina. Jean enjoyed every moment she spent with her daughter, and she was fascinated as she watched her grow from a frail child who was often distrustful and overly sensitive— just part of the damage inflicted by her father’s abandonment of her, and no great surprise since Jean felt many of the same things— to the confident and lovely young women she was now.

  It was the years in between that Jean missed the most, those sometimes awkward adolescent years when Christina was still finding her way, when she was becoming ‘more comfortable in her skin’, as Jean often put it. Unlike most teenaged girls, Christina never went through a rebellious phase, perhaps another consequence of her father’s leaving that she clung even tighter to the parent who remained. Instead, mother and daughter became even closer; their bond grew even stronger, if that was possible. Christina confided nearly everything in her mother— there would always be some things a teenager doesn’t share— and by the time she was in high school, she counted her mother as one of her dearest and most trusted friends.

  Those Saturday afternoons in the gallery with Christina were often Jean’s favorite days. On rainy days or on those quiet afternoons at the fringes of the tourist season when there were few customers, they would sometimes play gin rummy or checkers to pass the time, all the while talking about school or Christina’s friends, and later about boys. Christina would sometimes stroll around the gallery looking at the paintings. She made a game of trying to identify what had changed since the previous Saturday; what had been added, what was missing and what had just been moved. Whenever her mother was tending to a customer or was otherwise occupied, Christina would quietly wander through the gallery, carefully scrutinizing the art, making a mental note of each work and the artist, committing them to memory so she could recall them the following week. She would sometimes remark on the changes over a hand of cards.

  “The painting of the seagull with the crab is new,” she would remark casually as she splayed out her cards in her small hands. “Did you sell the one of the pier?” That was how she referred to the paintings when she was younger.

  As she grew older she became more familiar with the artists who returned every year to display their work in the gallery, and she had her favorites.

  “The Bosch is new,” she would remark casually, referring to the work of a particular artist whose name she recognized. “I don’t like it as much as his last one.”

  On slower weeks, just for fun, Jean would sometimes move the paintings in the store. Sometimes it
was for improved visibility from the sidewalk, but just as often it was simply to see if Christina noticed the changes on her Saturday visits to the store. She almost always did.

  By the time she was in high school, Christina was capable of minding the gallery for her mother while Jean ran a quick errand in town or visited with a neighboring shopkeeper. If Christina sold a painting in her absence, which she did on occasion, Jean paid her a commission, but more important to Christina was the expression of pride she saw on her mother’s face when she returned.

  When Jean closed the shop at the end of the day, the two of them would sometimes return home for a simple dinner, but just as often they would remain in town for a sandwich at Epi’s or a pizza at Rosalie’s— Christina’s choices most Saturdays— and sometimes a movie at The Criterion.

  On that particular Saturday in October, Jean had been feeling nostalgic all day. She didn’t mind being alone in the gallery most days, but on Saturdays she was reminded how much she missed Christina’s company, and how much she longed for those days when she was still the center of her daughter’s universe.

  Since she wasn’t expecting Christina’s visit, she decided to linger in town to visit with friends and to have a nice meal. She considered treating herself to a quiet dinner at one of the gourmet restaurants at the far end of Cottage Street, but in her current frame of mind, she found herself unable to resist the temptation to duck into Rosalie’s. She ordered a salad and two slices of cheese pizza and sat in a booth with her back to the door as she dined, wistfully thinking back on the many times she’d done exactly that with her daughter. It was at times like those, when she was reliving an experience she’d shared with Christina, that she was most acutely aware of the absence of her. So between the long quiet day alone at the gallery and the dinner at Rosalie’s, she was feeling particularly melancholy.

  “All these years I thought you only came in here because of me,” Christina said. She was standing behind Jean so that her mother was unaware of her until she spoke.

  Jean shrieked with joy and clambered out of her seat to embrace her daughter, her sadness instantly melting away. When she finally released her daughter from her embrace, Christina slid into the booth on the opposite side of the table.

  “What are you doing here?” Jean asked. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”

  Christina reached across the table and plucked a cherry tomato out of her mother’s salad and popped it into her mouth.

  “Are you hungry?” Jean asked. “Here,” she said, sliding her plate across the table to her daughter. “Have a slice. It’s your favorite.”

  For the moment, sitting across from her mother over pizza at Rosalie’s felt so comfortable that Christina nearly forgot the reason she’d come. She’d already determined she wasn’t going to mention her dilemma— or her proposition— until they returned home, so she decided she would try to relax and enjoy a pleasant dinner with her mother just as they had done on so many Saturday evenings over the years. After all, everything about their relationship was about to change, she thought. Like the approaching winter, there was no need to rush it.

  “What are you doing here?” her mother asked again.

  “I needed to get away for a couple days,” Christina said. “What are you doing here?”

  Jean was surprised by the question. “I live here,” she said.

  “No, I mean here,” Christina said, referring to Rosalie’s. “You never come here on your own.” She already knew the reason. “You’re feeling nostalgic, aren’t you?”

  Jean smiled. “Maybe a little,” she conceded. She reached out and touched her daughter on the arm. “I’ve been thinking about you all day, and all those Saturdays you used to stay with me in the gallery.” She was still smiling, but there was a tinge of sadness in her expression from the knowledge that those cherished days were merely memories now, growing more distant all the time. “I was thinking about how you used to memorize every painting, and how you could tell me every Saturday what was different from the week before. Even now, whenever I sell a piece or move them, I think about you, and how you always knew.”

  Christina knew even then that her mother sometimes moved the paintings just to challenge her. She knew, too, that her mother took far greater delight when Christina noticed the changes than when she didn’t.

  What bothered her most about her mother’s sentimental mood was that she knew it would make the news she planned to deliver later that evening even harder to accept. If all day her mother had been reminiscing about her daughter as a child, she would be forced, somewhat harshly, to acknowledge that those days were long behind them.

  No one slept much that night.

  Christina and Jean talked until nearly dawn, sometimes shouting, sometimes crying, until at some point, there were simply no more words. They started in the living room after returning from their evening in Bar Harbor, and by the time they were finished, they were curled up together on Jean’s bed. There had been many nights when, as a child, Christina sought comfort in her parents’ bed; this felt exactly like those occasions, except that the fear that led her there this time wouldn’t have passed when morning arrived.

  James lay on the sofa in his apartment anxiously waiting for the phone to ring until the early hours of the morning, the silence broken only by the ticking of the clock on the wall over his kitchen table and Max’s snoring, which James actually found soothing. He occasionally drifted off into a shallow sleep, only to be jarred awake, not by the ringing of the phone but by its even-more-alarming silence. He never descended deep enough into sleep that he was afforded the luxury of a dream, and given the scattered and troubling nature of his thoughts that night, that might have been a blessing. As Christina’s words played over and over in his mind, what troubled him most of all was the secret she’d asked him to keep.

  It wasn’t that he believed Christina was wrong that most disturbed him, but that he knew she was right. There was simply no option but to keep the fact that he was the father of this child a secret. ‘No good can come of it,’ were the words Christina had used more than once, and it was those words— along with ‘she can never know’ — that played repeatedly in his mind, as incessant and as steady as the ticking of the clock.

  Like so many things in his life, it meant that fatherhood came with a price, or at least a stipulation; keeping the truth from Jean meant also keeping it from his child. That would mean either deceiving the child by never explaining to him that he was adopted, or deceiving him by someday telling him that he was. Either way, James realized there would be more secrets and more lies ahead of him. He’d grown accustomed to keeping secrets, and lying to protect them, but this particular deception seemed even more deplorable than the rest.

  It would take some time for James to truly come to terms with what he’d agreed to. Ultimately, he decided that the boy— in his imagination, it was always a son— would always see him as his father, regardless of whether or not the boy ever realized that it was actually James’s blood that ran through his veins, or even if, to protect the lie, he was someday told that it wasn’t. He would always look up at his father with those same loving and trusting eyes that a child reserves for its parents, never knowing that his trust had been betrayed even before he was born.

  Through that long night in October, it seemed premature to be overly concerned with such things. After all, there was still the matter of Jean’s acceptance of Christina’s proposition, which was by no means guaranteed.

  It was the aroma emanating from Ruth Kennedy’s kitchen on Sunday morning that finally brought him back. Only then did he realize that the sun had risen out of the sea and was now streaming in through his kitchen window. He felt suddenly restless. After such a long night of introspection he’d grown tired of his own company, so he showered and dressed and took Max for his morning walk. When they returned, they joined Ruth in her kitchen for coffee and fresh muffins, trying to force something normal into a morning that was anything b
ut normal, but he was clearly distracted by every sound that even remotely resembled what might be the faint ringing of the telephone in his apartment.

  “Is everything okay?” Ruth finally asked him.

  James had been in the middle of spreading butter on a warm muffin when he appeared to pause and drift off in thought, his knife hovering motionless in the air. He finally regarded Ruth, only vaguely aware that she’d spoken.

  Ruth smiled at him. “My!” she said. “You looked like you were a million miles away. Is something wrong?”

  James shook his head and returned his attention to his muffin. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not very good company this morning.”

  He took a sip of his coffee and grimaced, and Ruth smiled and pushed the cream and sugar across the table in his direction.

  “You didn’t put anything in it yet, dear,” Ruth reminded him. Her tone was pleasant, as always, but she was concerned about her guest.

  James offered a weak smile and thanked her as he added the cream and sugar to his coffee.

  “If there’s anything you want to talk about, I’m happy to listen,” Ruth offered.

  James shook his head. “Nothing to talk about just yet,” James said. “But thank you.” He paused again, imagining he heard the distant ringing of a telephone.

  “Okay,” Ruth conceded. “I’m not one to pry.”

  To her credit, James knew that to be true. Even during the early days and weeks when he’d been a stranger living in her home, she was always respectful of his privacy. He knew she was curious about him, but she never pressed him for any information that he didn’t readily offer. She always seemed more interested, even then, in his companionship than in knowing his secrets, and the conversations shifted easily away from him and instead to the topic of her late husband, Henry. At first, James believed he’d been clever in how easily he deflected the focus of her attention, but he later realized that Henry was often the topic that she most wanted to talk about, as if asking about James’s past was more of a courtesy than it was a fixation, a polite prelude to the topic she almost always wished to discuss.