by Ann Hood
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Waiting to Vanish
A Novel
Ann Hood
For Melissa
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Acknowledgments
About the Author
CHAPTER ONE
MACKENZIE KEPT TELLING HERSELF that if the family had stuck together after Alexander died, it would be different. Easier somehow.
Jason suggested that things do not just fall apart like that. “There must have been a crack in the structure already,” he’d said. “Your brother’s death was just the catalyst.”
She had found his theory too ridiculous to be taken even a little seriously. Mackenzie carried an image of her family in which they were all in Rhode Island together in the big white Victorian house that her great-grandfather had built. She imagined them around the Queen Anne table, with cranberry candles in the just-polished candlesticks and, teetering in the center of the table, an angel that Alexander had made from dough in a long-ago art class. The food was familiar and comforting. And everyone was smiling. It wasn’t a real moment, but rather a combination of many moments, all true in some way. The curl of her mother’s auburn hair; the sound of her father clearing his throat, a habit of his; how Alexander squinted when he concentrated. Daisy, her brother’s ex-wife, wasn’t in it, although their son, Sam, usually was. And Grammie’s sternness, her sense of manners and protocol, hovered somewhere off center. But what dominated this montage were Mackenzie’s feelings of love, of rightness in that house.
“Sorry, Sigmund,” she’d told Jason, “your theory doesn’t hold for the Porters.”
Gently he had reminded her that in the stories she’d told him she had often mentioned her mother’s moodiness, her father’s silence.
“Those are personality traits,” she’d said. “Don’t distort them.”
Now she and Jason were in her apartment on Bedford Street. He had suggested a matinee, brunch at the NoHo Star, the Klee show at the Museum of Modern Art. But the day was cold and wet, and Mackenzie had said it was a day to stay home. Besides, Jason was leaving in a few days for a small town upstate where the new play he’d written was going to be performed as a workshop production. So they stayed in and made love while an old Tarzan movie played on television with the sound turned off.
Jason lay sprawled on the sofa bed. The couch itself was covered in a happy chintz, pinks and vivid reds. The sheets were scattered with tiny yellow roses. “Let’s go to the flower garden,” Jason had whispered earlier as he urged her toward the couch.
Mackenzie had turned the one bedroom into her darkroom. Her landlord had told her that Washington Irving had once lived in the apartment. And Dylan Thomas. Though not together, of course, he’d added. She loved the slightly sloping floors, the careful fleur-de-lis pattern carved into the moldings along the ceilings. If she was working late at night in the darkroom, snores rose through the floorboards from the apartment below. Now classical music drifted up. Mozart.
“Are you awake?” she whispered to Jason.
“Trying,” he said.
She wrapped herself in her old kimono and curled up on the window seat to look out. The right sleeve of the kimono had faded in spots from pale peach to, surprisingly, lemon yellow. The wind rattled the windows and something halfway between rain and snow fell. Mackenzie tested herself. She focused on a wreath hanging on a door directly across the street. It was fastened with a big red and green plaid bow.
“This is silly,” she mumbled.
Behind her Jason stirred, yawned.
“Tarzan is still on?” he said.
In two weeks, she thought, this will be over. I will have gotten through Christmas.
“Have you thought about my idea?” he asked. “To spend Christmas upstate with me?”
The night before Mackenzie and Jason had gone to a Christmas party at Travel Horizons, where Mackenzie worked as a free-lance photographer. But halfway through the evening, her own false cheer and strained enthusiasm had gotten to her. The art director, Margot, was telling Mackenzie about her holiday plans. “We’re driving to Connecticut this year and spending the whole week there. John says he’s going to cut down a tree and everything.” “That sounds fabulous,” Mackenzie had said, smiling and nodding, feeling awful. Across the small room, Jason was helping someone get a fire started in the fireplace. “I’m trying to think of something really corny to do for John,” Margot was saying. “Like knit a scarf.” She was wearing red Christmas tree ornaments as earrings. It was too much. Mackenzie knew she could not smile or say “fabulous” one more time so she left, practically ran out the door and down the hall that smelled like an Indian restaurant.
Mackenzie had spent the next few hours walking the tangled streets behind her building, trying to get lost. On a corner she passed a little boy giving away kittens. “Take one,” he told her. “I have to drown the leftovers.” When she got home, Jason was in her apartment, pacing the uneven floors.
“You are not alone,” he had shouted at her. “Do you hear me?”
“Everyone can hear you,” she’d said.
Now Jason was saying, “You’ll come to Poughkeepsie. We’ll spend Christmas together. Egg nog. ‘Silent Night.’ The works.”
Mackenzie pressed her fingertips against the window, as if to stop it from shaking.
“Mackenzie?” Jason said.
She turned to face him. On the television, Tarzan comforted a frightened Jane.
“I don’t know,” she said.
He tried to make his voice light. “I hope it’s Poughkeepsie that’s the deterrent and not me.”
Mackenzie studied the tip of her long ponytail. Out of the sun, her pale blonde hair had darkened to the color of beach sand. Lately she’d picked up an old habit of hers from her teens, searching the bottom of her hair for split ends.
“Of course it’s not you,” she said.
She tried to picture herself on a train speeding up the Hudson toward Jason, tried to imagine what kind of Christmas they would have together. She thought of old barns, deep snow, a bed covered with quilts. She would bring him winter things for gifts. Fur-lined gloves. Irish whiskey. A sled. Last year she had given her nephew, Sam, a sled. Its runners were a glossy red. Her mother had painted “Rosebud” in curly letters across the top. Stop, Mackenzie told herself. Stop thinking about it.
She watched as Jason pulled on his jeans and walked over to the coffee table littered with Chinese food containers. She had made that table from an old lobster trap, and it filled her with memories of home in Rhode Island, of trips to the ocean and clambakes in their backyard.
“Have you ever noticed that it used to snow more when we were kids?” Mackenzie said. Her grandmother used to say that if you wanted to avoid an argument, talk about the weather.
“Greenhouse effect,” Jason said. He seemed relieved to change the subject too. “Someday New York will be as
hot as Florida. Everything’s shifting.”
“You mean people will flock to the Rockaways for suntans in winter?” she said, and forced a smile. It felt stiff on her face.
“Hey,” he said.
Behind them, Tarzan gripped a long vine and started to swing through the trees. If the sound were on they would hear his famous yell. Instead, a Mozart concerto swelled beneath them.
“I’m trying not to focus on this damn holiday,” she said. “But it’s so pervasive. They even pipe Christmas music into elevators.”
“What do you say we run away somewhere that doesn’t have Christmas?” he said, trying for a real smile. “Jerusalem? Beijing? Teheran?”
“Don’t tempt me,” she said.
And then, inexplicably, she was gripped with sadness. She moved back to the window and looked down on Bedford Street. The wind turned a woman’s umbrella inside out.
“Rain in December,” Mackenzie said. “It’s ridiculous.”
“I have a great idea. A swell idea. You’ll come up with me tomorrow instead of waiting until Christmas. I bet you can get some great photographs of the country. Trees laden with snow. Very rustic.”
She shook her head. “You’ll be working on the play,” she said. She heard herself, a slight whine in her voice. She had been doing well, or at least better, before all of this holiday cheer had been forced on her. For a month now she had been filled again with grief. With an incredible ache. This was the first Christmas without Alexander. She longed for even the mechanical good cheer of her mother. But Cal had left, had just packed up Alexander’s old car and driven off. “I’ve had enough,” she had said. As if the rest of them hadn’t. Cal’s sister, Hope, got postcards from her, from national monuments and landmarks all over the country. Messageless postcards with her initials at the bottom. Mackenzie and her father hadn’t even gotten those.
Mackenzie had made halfhearted efforts to get through until New Year’s. She had bought Christmas cards of a smiling Empire State Building holding hands with the Statue of Liberty, but they remained in their boxes somewhere amid the pile of unopened cards she’d received. She’d brought home a small tree that sat on the kitchen table bare until Jason suggested they decorate it. He had strung unraveled typewriter ribbon like an inky garland, and had hung broken pencils from its branches. Finally Mackenzie had joined him. She looped film into the shape of a star and placed it on top.
Now she turned to Jason.
“I can’t get through this,” she said. “I mean, how much is a person supposed to take? I’m tired of reading about survivors. People stranded in the Andes and wiped out in wars.”
“You’ll come with me,” he said.
“Everybody has found a way to get through this. My mother takes off for who knows where. My father becomes a shoplifter. A kleptomaniac, for God’s sake. Everyone is acting out and I’m the one trying to get through this holiday alone. Me and Alexander’s ghost.”
“It’s worse around this time of year,” he said, then shrugged, knowing the sentiment sounded empty. “Hey,” he said, smiling, “you can teach me how to ski. We’ll make s’mores. You know, I’ve never had a s’more.”
“It just doesn’t seem right,” she said.
At Thanksgiving her father had invited her for a turkey dinner at Oakdale, the rehabilitation center where he was living. But she couldn’t bear the thought of eating there, surrounded by abused women, pyromaniacs, and sad old men. She couldn’t bear to admit that her own father, that Jams, was one of those troubled people. “He’s lashing out by taking other people’s things,” his doctor had told her. “It’s not uncommon.” “You mean it’s common?” Mackenzie had said, finding it hard to believe that mourners everywhere were thieves. “I mean it’s not unheard of,” the doctor said coldly. Still, Mackenzie could not grasp the comparison between Alexander’s death and stealing a box of staples.
She hadn’t joined Jams at Oakdale. He had called her the next day. “Turkey loaf,” he’d said sadly. “It’s a good thing you missed it. Canned cranberries. They tasted like Jell-O.” She had wanted to shout at him. Ask him what he was doing there. They could have been home together, gotten through this first Thanksgiving without Alexander, if he hadn’t checked himself in there. But she hadn’t said anything at all. Even when he confessed to her that he’d stolen a loaf of pumpkin bread from the kitchen, she remained silent. “I didn’t even eat it,” he’d said. “I just threw it away.”
As if he could read her mind, Jason said, “Thanksgiving would have been easier if you had come to Louisville for the play competition with me.”
“What? And watched that redheaded vixen chase after you?” Mackenzie laughed,
“Kyle is a baby. Besides, anyone can tell that I’m hopelessly in love with a blonde vixen.”
Once, a photo assignment had kept Mackenzie in India over Thanksgiving, and all the Americans had banded together for a makeshift dinner—roasted lamb instead of turkey, fried bananas, and basmati rice. When she’d called home, Sam, then four years old, had said, “Are you in a teepee? Are you wearing feathers?” Alexander had laughed on the extension. “I’m trying to teach him to say Native American,” he’d said.
It will be like India, Mackenzie had thought. She’d have an orphan’s Thanksgiving and invite everyone she knew who had no place to go. She would buy Indian corn and pumpkins for decorations. But everyone she called had someplace to go. Dinners with second cousins, maiden aunts, ex-boyfriends. Anything not to be alone. “Volunteer at a shelter for the homeless,” her friend Beth had suggested. Beth was flying off to Bimini for the long weekend. “I did that one year and it really helped me put everything in perspective.” “I don’t think my perspective is off,” Mackenzie had said. “Last year I had a normal Thanksgiving. I fought with my mother for being too cynical. My brother and I smoked a joint in the garage and trashed his ex-wife. And Sam spilled the entire plate of stuffing in my father’s lap. That is a normal Thanksgiving. That’s all I want.” “I don’t know,” Beth had said. “I’d rather go to Bimini.”
Mackenzie had spent the day alone in the St. Mark’s Cinema and watched East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause over and over, crying, thinking that Alexander had looked like a dark blonde version of James Dean. Her dinner was two falafels on Macdougal Street, where she cried at the black and white posters of early Simon and Garfunkel. Everything around her seemed representative of lost things, of sadness. The empty streets, the smell of espresso, the old man urinating in the corner—all of it made her more and more lonely. Finally she’d sat on a bench in Washington Square Park, tucked her legs under her, and willed herself to disappear from New York, from her sadness.
“No,” Mackenzie said out loud.
“No?”
“I’m going to have a terrific Christmas. I’ll drive down to Maryland and get Sam and we’ll do something wonderful. Stay at the Plaza, maybe. Go to Radio City.”
“Mackenzie,” he said, “I want us to be together. We can be a family. We can.”
She turned to him, her eyes a deep jade. “I have a family,” she said. “Don’t ever say I don’t.”
They stood in an angry silence until he said, softly, “I want you to do whatever you have to do to work this out. If it means not coming upstate with me, all right. But, please, work it out.”
Work it out. She had tried so hard to do just that. When Alexander had first died, she had written letters to anyone she thought might be remotely responsible for his death. Meteorological societies. The telephone company. His landlord. Her brother had been in his apartment in Boston, talking to Sam on the telephone, when lightning struck and electrocuted him. “Dear sir,” she’d written in letter after letter, “you’ve killed my brother,” She cited faulty wiring, sloppy installation, whatever applied.
After a while, she stopped writing and grew introspective. She’d sat on the beach and watched the waves, studied the patterns with which they rose and fell. Then she had tried to escape through Jason somehow. What now?
“Maybe what I need,” Mackenzie said to Jason, “is to go back home. Recreate an old-fashioned Porter Christmas.” He sat with his back to her. Tarzan had ended and now Abbott and Costello ran through a crowded outdoor market full of camels and Arabs in headdresses.
Her words seemed hollow. Impossible. She imagined, as she often did, her mother somewhere, living a different life. In Chicago or Miami or Des Moines. Writing poetry, sending blank postcards. Mackenzie wondered if there could be a “Porter Christmas” without her mother’s carefully wrapped packages and special plum pudding with brandy sauce.
She kneeled down in front of Jason. His eyes behind his wire-rimmed glasses were as brown as Hershey’s kisses.
“Maybe it will help Sam,” she said. “Going back to Rhode Island.” Last Christmas he rode the new sled all day in the backyard. He’d also gotten Ralph Lauren sweaters the colors of sherbet and a box of paints. Alexander had marked off Sam’s height, the tiny pencil mark even with Alexander’s when he had been six. At night they’d all played Twister, and had fallen together in a woolly heap in front of the tree.
“Maybe,” Jason said, “it will help you.”
His eyes softened, now the chocolate a melted brown.