Waiting to Vanish

by Ann Hood

  From downstairs, Grammie yelled, “Ricardo Havana, don’t you ever show your face here again.”

  A month later, everyone was in the living room watching a new group called the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show. The cameras showed close-ups of each one as they sang, and flashed their names on the screen. Alexander read each name out loud as it appeared. Mackenzie screamed along with the girls in the audience.

  “Paul,” Alexander read.

  The girls screamed.

  “What is happening here?” Grammie said. “Look at the hair on these singers. They look like a bunch of women.”

  “This,” Jams said, “is Beatlemania.”

  “John,” Alexander read.

  The girls screamed.

  “Sorry girls,” he read, “he’s married.”

  “I like Paul anyway,” Cal said.

  The front door opened then and Uncle Bill called into the living room.

  “Anybody home?”

  Grammie grabbed her fan and started to wave it. “Go and look,” she said, “and see if he’s brought back that two-timing Ricardo Havana.”

  Aunt Hope jumped up from the ottoman she was sitting on and started to cry.

  “George,” Alexander read.

  “I’ll go and see what’s happened,” Jams said.

  But he didn’t have to go very far. In the doorway stood Uncle Bill, dressed in a white suit and pink shirt, open at the collar. On his head sat a Panama hat. Beside him, clutching his arm, was a beautiful woman in a flaming red dress that fell in a million soft ruffles around her hips and thighs. Her hair was long and curly, the color of coal. Her own eyebrows had been tweezed off and replaced with thin penciled-in V’s.

  “Ringo,” Alexander read.

  No one listened. Everyone faced the doorway.

  “What is this?” Grammie demanded.

  “Everybody,” Uncle Bill said, “this is Carmen Havana.”

  There was shouting and confusion. Had Uncle Bill really brought home Ricardo Havana’s wife?

  “How could you?” Aunt Hope wailed.

  “Get that woman out of here,” Grammie said.

  “My new wife,” Uncle Bill said.

  All noise stopped, except for Ed Sullivan. He said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Beatles.” And the audience screamed.

  “Your what?” Cal said.

  “She’s Ricardo’s cousin,” Bill said. “I met her in Miami.”

  “I wanted him to marry Gigi,” Mackenzie whispered to Alexander. “Then we could all have moved to the desert and eaten cactus.”

  Carmen extended her arms. “Now where are Mackenzie and Alexander?” Her voice was husky.

  No one moved.

  “This woman,” Cal said, “will not touch my children.”

  Mackenzie thought that Carmen must be very bad. At family gatherings she always sat slightly apart from everyone. She brought earthenware bowls full of paella, steaming with shrimp and chicken and sausage. Aunt Hope never tasted it. Because of Carmen’s connection to Ricardo Havana, Aunt Hope completely ignored everything Carmen said or did.

  After a few years, Carmen left Uncle Bill and moved back to Miami. She said she couldn’t get used to the cold up north, even though in winter she wore two coats and brightly patterned mittens and fur-lined boots. She sent Mackenzie postcards of beautiful palm-tree-lined beaches, which she used to sketch in big drawing pads she took to carrying everywhere with her. The first Christmas after Carmen left, she sent the children three pet alligators. The animals lived for a few days in the red sink in the Porters’ basement. John-Glenn was afraid of the alligators. He thought they would grow large and eat him. When they were found drowned one morning, everyone suspected homicide. Alexander even started an investigation, but Cal stopped him, suggesting that it was most likely an accident and that it was probably better that they were gone anyway. For years, Alexander and Mackenzie speculated about who had drowned the alligators. He was sure it had been John-Glenn. But Mackenzie thought Aunt Hope was the murderer and had killed them out of some misplaced revenge against Ricardo Havana.

  The late afternoon winter light was gray and white. The clouds hung low and heavy with the cold. Mackenzie and Sam shivered when they stepped from the heated car into the December air. Sam’s eyes widened at the sight of the rows and rows of stone monuments marking the graves. Mackenzie had wanted to come here before she left Rhode Island. She had told Sam as they drove away from the beach that she was coming here. “I’ll drop you off at Aunt Hope’s,” she’d said. But he had shook his head violently, back and forth. “You want to come?” she’d asked, her mind racing, wondering if it was all right to take him to Alexander’s grave.

  He seemed calm now as they stood on an icy path between two rows of tombstones. The daylight was fading quickly. Mackenzie tried to orient herself. She had only been here once, the day of the funeral. Nothing had seemed right about that day. It was hot and sunny, the kind of day that Alexander would have called a definite beach day. They would have driven to the ocean with the top down and a Beach Boys or Four Seasons tape playing full blast. No one at the funeral wore black. Instead, they stood around the coffin in thin summer clothes, pastel colors, cotton and sleeveless. Someone, an old friend of Alexander’s from high school, had worn a bright orange T-shirt: MOONDOGGIE’S SURF SHOP, it said in sunshine yellow. Mackenzie could remember watching as Daisy swayed in her high-heeled white sandals, like a willow tree in a breeze. And no one had cried. They had all stood in stunned silence instead.

  “I don’t know exactly,” Mackenzie said as she led Sam by the hand.

  She felt his fingers tremble inside his mitten.

  “It all looks so different in this light,” Mackenzie said. “In the winter.”

  She remembered Daisy saying, “His tombstone should reach into the sky. Like Alexander himself. Reaching upward.” She wondered if her parents had agreed to that, if his monument was tall.

  Mackenzie saw, a few rows away, where she thought the spot might be, a headstone, taller than the rest, pointing upward.

  “Over there, I think,” she said.

  Sam paused at a child’s grave, his mouth open. JENNIFER, DARLING BABY OF …

  “Come on,” Mackenzie said, pulling him away.

  She shouldn’t have brought him, she thought.

  “I’m going to walk you back to the car, Sam,” Mackenzie said.

  She heard his breathing, hard and fast. He walked faster, ahead of her now. Mackenzie felt the stones he had given her at the beach in her pocket, heavy against her hips.

  “Sam,” she said, but he didn’t stop.

  He walked right to the taller headstone.

  Mackenzie stopped just behind him.

  ALEXANDER PORTER.

  She heard a moan, then realized it had come from her.

  The name, carved into the stone like that, seemed to belong to someone else, someone she had never known.

  Mackenzie looked at her own brother’s name on his grave. She remembered that when they had visited their ancestors’ graves in Pennsylvania, Alexander had stood beside her touching the name PORTER. “Gross,” he’d said, sticking his finger into the carved-out P.

  A white poinsettia stood next to the grave, its pot wrapped in shiny foil, a red bow draped around the base. Beside it was a blue basket of large pine cones, their tips dipped in white paint as if they had been frosted with snow or cake icing. Under his name, etched into the stone, it said: “The ball I threw in the schoolyard had not yet reached the ground.”

  Mackenzie frowned. Her mother had picked that, had shown her the quote in a book of poetry. Dylan Thomas.

  Mackenzie looked down at Sam. He was stuffed into his bright blue ski jacket. The down inside it made creases and squares on the coat. He dropped to his knees. Mackenzie knelt beside him. The ice cracked beneath her. She put her arms around him, the jacket squishing in her hands. His body felt rigid.

  “Sam,” Mackenzie said.

  She waited, half expecting him to answe
r, to suddenly talk. She felt, somehow, that, if he did, she would understand everything, that he held some key to it all. But he simply leaned against her and they stayed like that for a very long time.

  Sometimes Sam considered talking. Thought about it until he almost actually did it. Like when his aunt brought him to the cemetery.

  He hadn’t known what exactly to expect there. He remembered his father’s funeral, the quietness of it, the way the air felt thick and still. His mother had told him that his father was in that big box covered with flowers. The box was the color of his crayon called Burnt Sienna. His mother read the words on the ribbons that hung off the bouquets to him. Beloved Son. Brother. Nephew. He hadn’t understood. “Who?” he’d kept thinking. The night before the funeral, everyone went out. His mother had wanted to take him along. “He should be able to say good-bye to his father,” she had said. “It’s the kind of thing,” Jams had told her, “that sticks with a child. It’s not good.” In the end he had stayed behind with Aunt Hope. “It’s all right,” she had told him, “I didn’t look at my own mother.” What was that supposed to mean? he’d wondered, and he imagined Aunt Hope as a child, blindfolded.

  This time it was cold at the cemetery, and Aunt Mackenzie kept saying that maybe he should go back to the car. But he wouldn’t. He had to see whatever there was to see at his father’s grave. He had hoped there would be something of his father there. Maybe the Red Sox hat he always wore. But the only thing that was left was his father’s name.

  Sam had thought then about calling out. “Daddy,” he would shout, “I’m here.” But couldn’t his father see that he was there? If his father was indeed under this stone, in the ground, then he would see Sam and come out. Sam had knelt and banged on the icy dirt with his hands, as if to wake him. But he didn’t come out. And Sam didn’t speak. He was sure he had been right all along—his father had stopped talking and disappeared.

  After the funeral, everyone asked him the same questions, over and over. What was your daddy saying? Did he scream? The questions, to Sam, seemed silly. It wasn’t what his father had said, it was that he had stopped talking that was important.

  Sam had been asking him about Boston, which was where his father lived. There were streets made out of brick, a building that looked like an icicle, and once, there had been a war there. A war against England. “Was Princess Diana in the war?” Sam had asked. Sam loved Princess Diana. His father cut pictures of her out of magazines and kept them for him. “This war,” his father had told him, “happened a long long time ago. Before the Beatles or Princess Diana. Even before Jams.”

  His father knew about everything. He taught Sam songs and words all the time. That day, he taught Sam the word “itinerary.” “Here’s our itinerary,” he had said, “for when you get here.” They were going to eat lobsters, and even his father would wear a bib while he ate. One day, they would drive to Cape Cod, which was a beautiful place near the ocean. “By the sea,” his father had said, and Sam had sung, “By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea.” “You and me,” his father sang, “you and me, oh how happy we’ll be.”

  Boston had an aquarium with seals and whales and sharks. It had museums too. One with glass flowers, and one with scientific things, and one just for children. “Boston,” Sam had said, “sounds wonderful.”

  And then there had been the slightest crackle, the way the television sometimes sounded when the neighbor used his ham radio. Like a short buzz. It had been nothing like everyone asked him about. Not a jolt or a bang or a loud zzzzzt.

  Sam had waited for his father to tell him more.

  “What else?” he’d said.

  He had waited a very long time.

  Sometimes, when Sam talked on the telephone, he got tired or thirsty. He’d put the phone down for a little while and get a drink of water or watch television. But his father had told him if he did that he must say, “Hold on, please.” Maybe, Sam thought that day, his father had gotten thirsty and forgot to say, “Hold on, please.”

  It had been a long while before Sam got really frightened and started to scream. It was, he’d thought, as if his father had just disappeared. That thought frightened him because things that disappeared never came back. They stayed gone forever.

  It was like the lost continent of Atlantis.

  His father had told him the story about Atlantis. It had been a beautiful, beautiful place to live. A Utopia, was the word he’d used, which meant perfect, like heaven. Until one day there was a bad earthquake and Atlantis sunk into the sea. “Where did it go?” Sam had asked. “It just disappeared,” his father told him. And no one ever found it again.

  Sam had stopped talking and so far he hadn’t disappeared. But that was what he wanted. To vanish, just like his father had. When he finally did disappear, he expected to find his father and maybe even the lost continent of Atlantis. Every morning he would look in the mirror, expecting to find nothing. But instead, he always saw his own reflection staring back.

  His speech therapist, Miss Knight, was old and fat. Sam thought her neck looked like a turkey’s gullet, loose and saggy. She wore half-glasses that hung around her neck on a gold chain or sat on the very tip of her nose. Her hair was white, but sometimes, in a certain light, it looked vaguely blue, and Sam could see the pink of her scalp through her tight curls. Miss Knight kept a dish of animal crackers in front of him during the entire session, but wouldn’t let him have one until right before he left. He always chose the elephant, and ate it slowly—first the trunk, then the tail, and finally the head and body.

  Miss Knight usually sat in front of him on a velvet bench and made noises with her long, pointed tongue.

  “Th. Th. Th.”

  Or she said words that rhymed.

  “Spoon. June. Moon.”

  Then she waited, looking at him down her nose and through her small glasses.

  One day she said, “Sam, I’m going to tell you a story about a woman named Helen Keller. Helen Keller was born with the ability to see and speak and hear, but she got terribly ill and lost all of those senses.”

  Miss Knight stared at him for so long then that he had to look away. He focused instead on a lion animal cracker on the white plate.

  “But she picked herself up by the bootstraps, Sam, and learned to talk all over again. Despite every obstacle.”

  Miss Knight was pretty nice, but there were times when she got mad at him, like the day she told him about Helen Keller. And sometimes, after sitting in front of him making sounds and waiting, she’d take off her glasses and let them fall around her large bosom and Sam would know she was mad at him.

  She’d shake her head and say, “Do you know what I think, Sam Porter? I think you can talk just fine. You’re just a very stubborn, very selfish little boy.”

  What Miss Knight didn’t know—what no one knew—was that if he talked, he wouldn’t disappear. He’d just keep right on the way he had been, living with his mother, going to school, except he’d never see his father again.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE WOMAN SITTING BESIDE Jams was named Ursula. She always sat next to him at dinner, and looked at him shyly with her marmalade-colored eyes. She had hair the color of carrots and very white skin that was covered with freckles. She had come here to escape a husband who beat her. A bruise still lingered on her cheek, yellow like an old autumn leaf.

  “He hit me all the time,” she said. “If Taxi was a rerun or the electric company man misread our meter. Anything.”

  Jams nodded. He sometimes felt saturated by other people’s problems. Sometimes he wished he could propel himself backward into time. There would be a puff of smoke and then his chair at this table would be empty. Ursula would gasp when she realized he had disappeared. Her orange eyes would grow wide. Maybe she’d even faint, while all the time he would be back in Pennsylvania, in his boyhood room, like Peggy Sue in the movie Peggy Sue Got Married.

  To Jams, his life had been a pleasant blur sandwiched between two periods of glaring reality.
He remembered more details about his childhood and about the past few months since Alexander had died than he did about all the time in between. He could clearly recall the taste and feel of that tangerine he’d stolen right before Cal had left, yet he could not remember his own wife’s scent, or the way her skin felt. And he could startle himself with recollections of his childhood in Pennsylvania, with things that seemed too trivial to remember.

  “The final straw, though,” Ursula was saying, “was when he strangled a litter of kittens. Our cat had three kittens, little black ones, and he killed every one of them.”

  And then Jams surprised himself by telling Ursula a story of something he had seen long ago, using details he had no idea he recalled.

  “I had a friend when I was a boy,” he said, “named Jay Hogue. His family had a farm nearby and I’d ride my bike out there. We lived in the center of town, right off the main street in a big white house surrounded by porches so that any time of day you could sit in the sunlight. My grandfather designed it that way.” As he spoke, Jay Hogue’s face—crooked nose, hair the color and texture of hay—loomed in front of him with great clarity. Jams saw his old bike, a red and white one with red, white, and blue streamers on the handlebars.

  “Yes?” Ursula said. She was trying to get the connection, pulling her face tight as if that might help.

  “Well,” Jams said, “one day I rode out there. My God! This is incredible. It had rained earlier that morning and I had to ride through a lot of mud and puddles. And even once I got to the farm I had to sort of traipse through even more mud. My jeans got filthy. And my sneakers too. We went to the barn. We used to like to hang out in there. Jump around on the hay, things like that. My father owned a hardware store in town. Sometimes we’d help him out, sometimes we’d help Jay’s father on the farm. Make a little pocket money. Anyway, on this particular day, we walked in the barn with a stack of comic books to read and found their dog—a big golden retriever name of Tops—gobbling up a litter of kittens. Five of them. Little bitty things, too.”