Waiting to Vanish

by Ann Hood

  “Back already?” she said when he came in.

  “I want it,” he said. “Call that couple and tell them not to come.”

  She smiled. Her lipstick was fading, and as if she was aware of that, she touched her mouth lightly. “This is fantastic, Jason,” she said. “The apartment is so you.”

  He wanted her to go now. Already, the apartment felt like it was his and Mackenzie’s, and the realtor seemed an intruder. He wanted to fill the apartment with things for Mackenzie, corny things. A cross-stitched sampler that said Home Sweet Home. Towels embossed with His and Hers. A geranium in a pot.

  “Call the other couple, okay?” he said.

  “Oh. I have a feeling they won’t show,” Mindy said. “Do you want to come back to my office and fill out the preliminary papers?”

  “Sure,” he said. “In a minute.”

  “I’ll meet you there?” she said.

  He nodded.

  He wanted Mackenzie there with him, and Mozart playing in the background. He wanted Mindy gone.

  “I guess you want to let it sink in,” she said.

  He nodded again.

  When she finally left, he stood in the middle of the empty living room and closed his eyes. Already the details of the apartment were clear to him. The kitchen floor, the painted border around this room. He heard the violins of a Mozart concerto rising, rising around him.

  When Mackenzie was in junior high, she used to have a black and white poster of Paul Newman taped to her bedroom wall. In the poster, his eyes were in color. A vivid blue. She would sit for hours in her room, gazing at those eyes. She remembered the first time her mother saw it, the way she was startled by the blueness of Paul Newman’s eyes.

  She had laughed at first, then, running her fingers around the poster’s edges, had turned to Mackenzie, angry.

  “This isn’t taped up here, is it?”

  Mackenzie had laughed, not used to seeing her mother so angry.

  “How else would it stay up there? Magic?”

  She had laughed when she said it. Cal usually joined in with a joke, but this time she hadn’t.

  “You are going to ruin these walls. The tape will pull the paint off. Don’t you care about anything? I’m tired of all of this. Of no one caring about anything.”

  Mackenzie had refused to take the poster down. Years later, the outline of it was still marked off on the wall by yellowed squares of tape, a perfect poster-shaped outline.

  She remembered this as Sam sorted through posters in a store on Union Street. He stood at a bin of old movie stills, and stared into the soulful eyes of Bette Davis, Vivien Leigh, and Humphrey Bogart as if they knew something that he needed to know too. Watching him, Mackenzie thought of those blue Paul Newman eyes staring down at her. A girlfriend, she remembered, used to say before she undressed, “Cover your baby blues, Paul.”

  The door opened and a woman walked in quickly. Her head was bent and Mackenzie glimpsed a wavy crown of chestnut. For an instant, she thought it was her mother. But then the woman looked in her direction and she saw that the face was too wide, the eyes too green.

  Sometimes, after Alexander died, Mackenzie would see a man pass her and she would think, for a fast moment, by his gait, or the color of his hair, that it was her brother. She wanted to reach for him, stop him. Alexander is alive, she’d think, until the man moved closer. Then she would see that he was a taller man, or fatter, that his eyes were not Alexander’s at all. And Mackenzie would have to admit to herself that Alexander would not ever be seen again, coming out of a restaurant, or holding a pretty girl’s hand.

  Since she’d been in San Francisco, she had scanned every crowd for her mother, knowing that someone with Cal’s hair or walk could indeed be Cal herself. Mackenzie had a fear that she would really pass her mother on the street, and Cal would ignore her, refuse to talk. She imagined screaming to her, “Mom, it’s me. It’s Mackenzie,” and Cal just continuing to walk, disappearing over one of the city’s dropping hills, or into the fog.

  Sam held a black and white poster of Charlie Chaplin in his hands. His face was pressed close to it, as if Charlie Chaplin were whispering very softly to him.

  What is he thinking? Mackenzie wondered. She sometimes had the urge to shake the boy. Talk, she wanted to shout at him. But she knew that he wouldn’t respond, but instead would turn his face from hers. It would be like her brother turning away. With Sam, she found herself pretending he was Alexander and they were both children together again. In the fantasy she could keep him safe. And then Sam would do something uniquely Sam and again Mackenzie would have to remind herself that Alexander was dead.

  That had happened on the cable cars this morning. She and Sam had ridden them over and over, up and down the hills, zigzagging the city. It was what Alexander would do, the same thing, again and again. Every time they reached the end of a run, Sam got right back on the next car. He stood in the open doorway and let the wind blow through his hair, his mouth opened.

  In Chinatown, a woman got on with a pair of twin daughters, and Sam had made a face behind their back, a face that looked, to Mackenzie, very much like Daisy. And she had had to remind herself that Alexander was dead, they were not children again.

  “Enough,” she had said. “I’m hungry.”

  Sam was disappointed and at Sears, where she ordered him a large order of sourdough french toast, he refused to eat.

  “This is a very special treat,” she’d said, feeling guilty for making him get off the cable car.

  She wished she could crawl into his head, even for a few minutes. Here he was, far from Daisy, but not seeming homesick or sad at all. He seemed, instead, like he was waiting for something, always.

  Sam still held the Charlie Chaplin poster.

  “Do you want this?” she asked him.

  He nodded.

  Earlier, she had tried to buy him a souvenir in an attempt to befriend him again. A metal cable car, painted a brick red with yellow trim. But he had refused it, still angry at her.

  “Do you know who Charlie Chaplin was?” Mackenzie asked him after they had left the store.

  Sam smiled. He clutched the rolled poster and swung it like a cane as he walked, bowlegged ahead of her.

  “Where did you learn that?” she laughed.

  For a split second then, the way he looked at her, Mackenzie was sure he was going to answer her. That he was going to talk right out loud.

  “Sam,” she said, her voice only slightly more than a whisper, “who taught you to walk like Charlie Chaplin?”

  She kneeled in front of him, remembering how Alexander had once pretended to eat his shoe, copying Charlie Chaplin, and Mackenzie had run to their mother screaming that Alexander was eating leather. Cal had sat on the floor and laughed uncontrollably while Mackenzie had watched in horror.

  “Sam,” she said again.

  But the moment had passed and she knew he was not going to speak. He looked past her, down the steeply sloping hill that seemed to disappear into the water below. She had promised to take him down the crookedest street in the world.

  “Come on,” she said, “I think you’re ready for Lombard Street.”

  The last thing Mackenzie wanted to do was go to Iris Bloom’s. Once, when Alexander and Daisy were dating, Mackenzie had gone with him to the Blooms’ house. It had smelled like food, an overwhelming odor of barbecue sauce, Fritos, and french fries. Mrs. Bloom had given her a glass of milk with a smudge of salmon lipstick on the rim. “The furniture,” Mrs. Bloom had told her, “is contemporary Danish.” Iris had sat beside Mackenzie on the aqua couch, and had stared into her eyes. “Is your hair dyed?” she’d asked her finally. “No,” Mackenzie had said. The couch, she remembered, had low cushions and blonde wood trim. Iris had kept staring. “I believe you,” she’d said after a while, as if Mackenzie had passed some sort of test. Iris had shown her some turquoise and silver jewelry then, triangular earrings and a bracelet and ring that some boy had given her. He had a strange name, like Stic
k. Or Stone. He had bought the jewelry in New Mexico. “Someday,” Iris had whispered to her, “I’m going west.”

  Sitting there at the Blooms’, Mackenzie had kept thinking about Emma Matlock. Every summer, when school ended, Alexander and Mackenzie took the train to New York and spent a weekend with Emma at her mother’s apartment. The lobby of the building had marble floors, and chandeliers that sparkled like glass rainbows. From the Matlocks’ windows, they could look down on the Hudson River and all the lights of the city. Emma always took Mackenzie on a shopping spree, to Saks and Bergdorf’s, then to Rumplemeyer’s for ice cream in silver bowls.

  The walls of the Matlocks’ apartment were covered with masks from all over the world. “Africa. Java. Japan,” Mrs. Matlock would say, her voice soft like Emma’s, as she pointed to the different masks. Years later, as Mackenzie had watched the news and had seen, over and over, where John Lennon had been shot, she’d recognized the Matlocks’ building in the background. She had called Alexander. “That’s Emma’s building,” she’d said. “I know,” he’d told her. “So what?”

  That day at the Blooms’, she’d thought of the quietness of Emma’s apartment, and the damp, junglelike smell from all the exotic plants that filled it.

  “How can you go out with someone like Daisy Bloom?” she’d asked her brother as they drove home.

  The top on the Mustang was down, and she had breathed in the clean autumn air.

  Alexander had slammed on the brakes, had stopped the car right in the middle of the street.

  “Don’t you ever ask me that again,” he’d said.

  At Iris Bloom’s apartment in San Francisco, Mackenzie expected to find the same stale food smell, the same furniture. She was surprised when Iris opened the door, dressed normally except for one ear laden with stud earrings from top to bottom.

  “Your hair,” Mackenzie said.

  Iris laughed.

  “That’s just what your mother said.”

  When, Mackenzie wondered, had her mother seen Iris? She was certain Iris had not been to Alexander’s funeral. She had, Mackenzie remembered, sent a fruit basket, a large carved watermelon as if they were having a luau instead of a burial.

  “Now, Sam,” Iris was saying, “tell me all about your adventures. I understand your Aunt Mackenzie whisked you off to Rhode Island.”

  They followed Iris into the living room. There, behind an avocado tree draped with red lights, hung one of Mackenzie’s own socks.

  Iris chattered to Sam about his name.

  “Samson,” she said, “means sun. Like sunshine. Isn’t that lovely?”

  Sam shrugged as he stared into a large pyramid-shaped crystal.

  “Of course, I know your name is just Sam, not Samson, but it’s something to think about.”

  “That’s my sock,” Mackenzie said.

  Alexander had given her those knee socks one Christmas. Blue and white with reindeer and snowflakes. One of the reindeer had had a red rhinestone nose that fell off long ago.

  “It is?” Iris said. “I thought it was your mother’s.”

  Mackenzie sunk into the bright purple bean bag chair, exhausted. She wanted, more than anything now, to crawl into her own bed in the house in Rhode Island, with stenciled flowers on the headboard and the smell of winter and Christmas everywhere, and to sleep. When she awoke, Alexander would be there and her father would be well and Cal would stroke her head and tell her it had all been a bad dream. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. She would look up and point to them all and say, “You were there and you were there and it’s so good to be home.”

  The fact that Cal had been to Iris Bloom’s seemed preposterous. But there was Mackenzie’s sock, and Iris was holding out a postcard.

  “She left this for you,” Iris said.

  FAMOUS POTATOES.

  “Idaho,” Mackenzie said.

  “Actually,” Iris said, “she’s up at Point Reyes. To reflect.”

  “She’s had three months to reflect,” Mackenzie said.

  She looked at the cryptic message.

  “Mackenzie, back on Sunday. Wait.”

  “Is this it?”

  “Yes.”

  Mackenzie tried to call to mind one of the images of her mother that had filled her these past months, but instead remembered her sitting alone on the beach at Cape Cod. It was late, the stars so plentiful it seemed like they could be plucked from the sky, picked like fruit from a low-hanging bough. The tide had rushed in, wrapped around her ankles. Mackenzie had wanted to call to her, had been gripped with fear as Cal stared out, not at the sea, but beyond. Suddenly, her mother had turned and, seeing Mackenzie, had waved and walked to her. What she felt now was like that fear that her mother would not come back to her.

  “My mother and I used to stay up and watch the late movies together after everyone else went to bed,” Mackenzie said. If she said it out loud, it made it more real than the other memory. “She knows every line from some of those. Like Stella Dallas. And Dark Victory with Bette Davis. ‘Prognosis negative, right, doctor?’” In recalling those nights now, Mackenzie wondered if her mother had been looking beyond her too as they sat together.

  “Do you want your sock back?” Iris asked.

  Somehow, her mother relinquishing that sock so easily to Iris Bloom disturbed Mackenzie, even though she herself had left it at home, tucked carelessly in a drawer, its mate long gone, eaten by the dryer or lost somewhere. The red rhinestone nose, she remembered, had sparkled so in the box.

  What Christmas was that? Before Sam was born, when Alexander had lived in New York.

  With a jolt, Mackenzie realized that this Christmas had passed unnoticed. She and Sam had spent it riding cable cars and taking a taxi down Lombard Street, his eyes growing wider at every jagged corner. He had squeezed her hand, afraid, she supposed, of dropping into the Bay that glittered below them. The radio in the cab had played Christmas music, Burl Ives and Perry Como. Thirty-six hours of cheer, the disc jockey had promised. For dinner they’d eaten in Chinatown. Sam had picked out a pair of Chinese slippers with pink and turquoise flowers embroidered on the toe for Brandy. Outside, in the distant sky, someone sent off fireworks, thick clouds of chalky red and blue exploding beneath a half-moon.

  “No,” Mackenzie said. “I don’t want the sock. It used to have one reindeer with a sparkly red nose.”

  “Rudolph,” Iris said.

  Just a year ago, Mackenzie thought, she and Alexander had sat together under the Christmas tree and talked about every ornament that hung above them, the decorations a history of their childhood, and their mother’s childhood. They had searched, as they did every year, for the apple ornaments. They were red and slightly misshapen, the paint chipped and the white ink across them faded. But the names were still legible. HOPE. CAL. It had been a ritual every year, to find those ornaments. Last year, as Alexander had reached deep into the tree’s branches for one of those apples, pine needles had showered down onto him. When Mackenzie brushed them away, she had seen strands of silver in her brother’s hair. She had held her hand there, slightly above him, the silver and dark blonde dusted with pine, for a moment, frozen.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CAL SAT ON THE beach at Point Reyes, behind a dune covered with scratchy brown grass. The wind whistled like a chorus of men singing to her. She held her thick hair in one hand to keep it out of her face. There was sand in her mouth and in the picnic food she’d brought with her. She wiped some off the Monterey jack cheese.

  Alexander had been the only person who knew she was a fraud, she thought.

  Not long before he died, she’d met him in Boston for lunch, at an outdoor cafe in Fanueil Hall. The Flower Garden, it was called. But there had been no garden. Just a view of a nearby greenhouse, with pots of tulips and lilies and daffodils in front.

  Cal had arrived there early, and sat amid the Saturday afternoon tourists, feeling like a foreigner herself. She had watched as Alexander approached, and had been struck by his manliness, his adultn
ess. He had had his hair cut short, and it looked blonder that way, the top slightly bristled. She had remembered, watching him come toward her, the crew cuts he’d had as a child, sitting in the barber’s chair, scowling. She’d felt, suddenly, very old and tired.

  Alexander had studied the wine list with great interest.

  “What do you say, Mom?” he’d asked her, and pointed to a wine.

  It was as if he’d gone from a teenager to a man overnight. All of his years with Daisy seemed remote then. The girl had always seemed an unpleasant intrusion, interrupting the family and keeping Alexander away. Now, here he was, back again, and Cal had been taken by surprise, not only at the sight of him as he tasted the wine and flirted with the waitress, but also at herself. Her children were grown, she’d realized, and her life had become endless nights of playing cribbage and staring into the darkness as she lay in bed beside Jams, feeling empty. At least when the children were small, they had kept her occupied, busy.

  They’d had almost the entire bottle of wine before Alexander had brought up the subject. He’d talked first about the summer class he was teaching—“On that all time favorite trio, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald,” he’d laughed. He’d told her that he wanted to take Sam to the Cape. “You have good memories from there?” she’d asked, needing to hear that he had been a happy child, that she had done something right.

  That was when he’d said it.

  “You know, I always felt while I was growing up that you’d rather be someplace else than where you were.” He’d looked at his glass of wine instead of at her. “I mean, you did all the right things for us. More than what would be expected. But somehow I always felt it wasn’t what you wanted to be doing. Like you wished you could disappear from us and reappear someplace else.”

  They had both stared at his wine, swirling in the glass, making a red web.

  “Remember when we all went to the Ice Capades?” he’d said.

  “Mackenzie’s birthday.”

  “I remember Mackenzie asked you if you could have any one thing there, what would it be. She said she’d like the ladies’ blue sparkling suit and white skates. You said—”