Vanished

by Mary McGarry Morris

  “You tell it,” Canny said.

  The three children watched him bite his lip and frown. He screwed up his mouth and his lips trembled on the edge of thought. “Once … once ’pon.…” His hand groped in the air, then fell. Dismally, he shook his head. “I can’t,” he said, blinking miserably. “I can’t think of the words.”

  For a moment the three little girls just looked at him.

  “Are you a retard?” Kelly asked him.

  “Course he ain’t!” Canny snapped.

  “Dotty said he is!” Kelly shot back.

  “She did not!” Canny said, her eyes blazing.

  “Yes, she did!” Kelly insisted. She turned to her younger sister. “Didn’t she?”

  Krystal shrugged, and at that, Kelly snatched the little girl’s last cookie. Krystal began to cry.

  “Give it back,” Wallace ordered.

  A coldness like the father’s blanked the child’s eyes. She bit into the cookie, then took another bite, watching him deliberately as she chewed.

  “You ain’t a very nice girl,” Wallace muttered. Sweat ran down his back and the hair on the back of his hands stood up. The girl unnerved him. He took three cookies from the box and gave two to Krystal and one to Canny. “And none for you,” he said in a shaky voice. “Now if you’da asked, ’stead’ve grabbing, you’d’ve got one too.”

  “Old fart,” Kelly said under her breath.

  “You shut up!” Canny said.

  “He ain’t my father!” Kelly spat. “And I don’t have to listen to his shit.”

  “Yes you do,” Canny said. “You have to do what he says till your daddy comes home!”

  “No, I don’t,” Kelly said. “And you don’t have to, ’cause he ain’t your father either!”

  The littlest girl put down her lemonade. She wiped her mouth and looked at Wallace, who stood close by the stove. “Ain’t you a father?”

  He took off his apron and folded it into a small, tight square. Canny looked at him. “He’s my father, so acourse he’s a father!”

  “No he’s not,” Kelly said, a note of triumph rising in her voice. “And I heard Dotty say so. She said they got you from gypsies and they’re gonna give you back to the gypsies.”

  “You shut up,” Canny warned.

  “It’s a secret,” Kelly gloated. “But I know all about it. They’re taking you back to the gypsies and the gypsies are gonna pay a thousand dollars and they’re gonna sell you to a mean old lady. And she’s gonna make you eat dog food and sleep down the cellar with the rats and the spiders!”

  Wallace shivered.

  “Poor Canny,” Krystal shuddered.

  “You’re crazy, you know that?” Canny said, her voice quavering and small.

  “I know another secret too,” Kelly said, in a singsong voice. She smiled and her eyes glowed like hot coals. “They’re taking off with all the money the gypsies give ’em and they’re gonna move far, far away to Hollywood—just the two of them.…” Her voice trembled. “And me!” she added triumphantly.

  After Krystal and Kelly had gone to bed, Wallace sat on the couch watching television with Canny. “I hate her!” Canny said, twisting her hand to her mouth so she could chew a strip of cuticle.

  “Buncha lies is all,” Wallace said. He pulled her hand away and set it in her lap. Her fingernails had been gnawed to the quick.

  “Why’d she say it then, if it wasn’t true?” Canny asked. “’Specially in front of you!” She started to raise her hand and he pushed it back down.

  “’Cause,” he said, then thought a minute. “’Cause she wants to be happy and she’s jealous ’cause you’re a happy girl. And being mean’s the only way she knows to do it.”

  “To do what?” Canny had started braiding the threads hanging from the cuff of her shorts.

  “To be happy.”

  She looked up. “That don’t sound right, Poppy.”

  “I know,” he had to admit. But somehow it was true. In order to explain it better, he would have had to tell her about Hyacinth, who was that way herself; always searching for happiness and hating whoever found it before she did.

  Canny yawned. She lay down with her head in his lap. As soon as she was asleep, he eased out from under her and began to tidy up the kitchen. He piled the toys in a big box and laid the children’s sneakers on the stairs. Then he scrubbed the stove top with ammonia and scoured the sink gritty clean. After that, he set the chairs upside down on the table so he could sweep and mop the kitchen floor. He needed to keep busy. It was the one way he knew to stave off fear and loneliness. Of course the girl was lying, he told himself. Everything she said she made up to hurt Canny. “That’s all,” he muttered, bearing down on the mop and scrubbing as hard as he could. “Just a buncha lies,” he sighed.

  He drew the mop across the floor and backed into the living room. He stood in the doorway watching the dry streaks widen in the cracked, dull linoleum. Outside, the darkness thickened with heat. It seemed that he could hear each cricket, each bullfrog and hissing leaf, separate and apart from every other sound.” Even the muffled buzz of the telephone grew distinct and clear. It filled the house.

  Before he sat down, he uncovered the telephone, and the minute he replaced the receiver, the phone rang. He let it ring a long time before he finally picked it up.

  “Hello? Hello?” demanded a woman’s voice. “Can you hear me? Answer me, goddamn it. Where the hell’ve you been, you bastard!”

  “I dunno,” he said hoarsely. He thought it was Hyacinth. He closed his eyes and shook his head.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?” the voice shrieked.

  But it was true. For at that instant, he not only did not know where he had been for the last five years, but had no idea, not even the slightest sense, where he was right now.

  “You know what it’s like sitting here all this time waiting for you to come? I mean, who the hell do you think you are?”

  He shrugged and did not answer. His head hung in shame. He felt something tighten, then swirl free, in his throat, like a sink suddenly unclogged.

  “I been lost,” he tried to say, but it came out sounding like a wheezy cough.

  “Who’s this? Is this Jiggy? Jiggy, this is Alma … you been drinking?”

  He blinked and cleared his throat. “They ain’t back yet,” he said, and hung up.

  He sat on the couch and lifted Canny’s head back into his lap. In her sleep, she scratched violently at her head. He was remembering his boys, short like himself, with bowed, runty legs and cowlicks sprouting up like weeds from their slicked-down pates, so that all through Sunday service, Hyacinth would be licking her fingers and pressing the hair into place.

  He tried to concentrate on the television show, but everything was reminding him of Hyacinth and the boys. The telephone had begun to ring again. He stared at the television. It was one of those preacher shows. “Reverend Maximilian Green,” read the gold-leafed nameplate on the desk, where the preacher sat with his hands clasped on a bible. With the phone still ringing, Wallace couldn’t hear a word the preacher said. His slicked-back hair and bushy mustache reminded him of Hyacinth’s uncle, the Reverend Pomeroy Hind, a hell-raising, womanizing wife beater who, before he got the calling, used to make blood sausage in between insulating jobs. Hyacinth said Pomeroy had six visions, each one more “terrifrightning” than the one before. The sixth vision caught Pomeroy way up top Bald Peak in his truck, without a stitch on. The troopers called Aunt Berthie, who swore to her dying day that the young man the troopers saw leap from the truck and dart into the woods was the very same horned devil of the first five visions.

  The phone stopped ringing.

  On the front porch, the dog had begun to growl. Wallace reached for Canny’s soft, sweaty hand and clutched it in his. The dog’s sudden racking bark hit the night like a volley of gunfire. It began to pace back and forth on the porch, its bushy tail sweeping across the screens. Wallace tensed forward, hoping to hear Huller’s truck. The sky rumble
d with thunder and the whole house shimmied with the resounding crack of light that split the black night like a jagged seam. With a howl, the dog leaped at the screen door, its red eyes raw with fear. At the next clap of thunder, the dog began to whimper and paw miserably at the bulging screen. Wallace tiptoed over the drying floor and opened the door. With the dog cowering at his heels, he closed all the windows, he and the dog both flinching each time the panes flared with lightning.

  When Dotty and Huller finally got home, Wallace was asleep, his head bobbing over Canny. Hunched close to him was the dog. Dotty’s eyes were heavy and smudged as she bent to wake him up. Opening his eyes, he cringed back. In the flickering silvery light of the television, her face had the hollow boniness of a skull. Instinctively, he reached for Canny.

  “In the kitchen,” she was saying. “We have to talk.…”

  Huller was setting the chairs on the floor. He had opened two cans of beer, one for himself and one for Dotty. His shirt was unbuttoned and he raked his nails across his chest, regarding Wallace’s sleepy entrance with hard, glassy eyes.

  Wallace sat down with his knees pressed close together. He had to go to the bathroom, but would not with Dotty and Huller so close by the bathroom door.

  Everything about Dotty seemed mussed and out of kilter. Her hair was damp and straggly. Her eyes flitted between the two men. She shifted in the chair and wet her lips nervously until Huller sat down. When he did, she leaned, strained toward him, as he took a piece of paper from his shirt pocket. He looked at her, then opened the paper carefully, and laid it on the table, running his finger along the crease in the black-and-white picture.

  “Aubie!” Dotty said, reaching out to touch his arm. “I want you to …”

  “You be quiet!” Huller ordered.

  Like a child, she drew back her hand and sat staring anxiously at the paper, which Huller had pushed in front of Wallace. It was a picture of a small child.

  “Recognize her?” Huller asked in a tight voice. Outside, sheets of rain billowed across the porch.

  Wallace leaned forward, angling his head under the flickering light. In the picture, the little girl wore white overalls. Her hair was pale and short about her face like a thin wispy cap. She stood with her arms outstretched as if she were about to take her first step—or fall, Wallace thought. Her blurred features were lost in the grainy shadows.

  “Well?” Huller said, tapping his fingers on the tabletop.

  “Can’t see her face too good,” Wallace muttered. He leaned closer and squinted until his eyes were almost closed.

  “Tell him!” Dotty said, breathlessly. At that, Wallace’s head shot up and his eyes darted toward Canny still asleep in front of the television set. Her hand hung from the couch in a tight fist.

  “He knows,” Dotty was telling Huller. “He’s just scared.” She leaned over to Wallace. “Don’t be scared, Aubie. It’s okay.” She tried to smile, but all her features seemed to quiver and jerk. Wallace’s chin clamped into the roof of his mouth as he stared at her. She blinked and looked away.

  “Where’d you get that picture?” he asked her.

  Dotty looked at Huller. “See!” She grabbed his arm. “He knows!”

  “I told you to shut up!” Huller said fiercely. He shook his arm free of her grasp. “I want to hear it from him!”

  Her face twisted. “Tell him, Aubie!” she hissed. “You know it’s her—just like when we got her!” She slammed her fist onto the table and moaned to see his eyes blank on hers.

  “Where’d you get that picture?” he repeated dully.

  Dotty looked to Huller, who just sat there, patient as a cat now between two gutted birds.

  “The post office,” she said slowly, her eyes rising to Wallace’s.

  “Aubie, there’s a reward! Her family’ll pay twenty-five thousand bucks to get her back! But Jiggy’s gotta know for sure. He wants to hear it from you.…” Her voice pitched and caught like the twangy whine of a fiddle’s high string. “Tell him, Aubie! Tell him who’s in the picture. Tell him!”

  Wallace looked down at the picture. He rubbed his knuckles over his palm. The room dimmed and seemed about to swallow itself in darkness. He shook his head. Huller chuckled and picked up the picture. Dotty grabbed it and thrust it under Wallace’s face. “Look at it!” she warned. “And you better say who it is, goddamn you, or I’m walking out that door this minute, and by Jesus, this time I mean it!” She started to get up, but Huller pushed her down in the seat.

  “Is it Canny?” Huller asked.

  “I dunno,” Wallace muttered.

  “Bastard!” Dotty groaned, jumping out of the chair and flying at him. He looked up just as her open hand cracked across his cheek.

  “My one chance! My one big break and you’re gonna screw it all up?” she cried, slapping him again. “No sir! I’ll do it myself. Like I always had to do everything.…” She picked up the paper and threw it at him. “I knew this would happen. You don’t want to give her back, do you? You want to keep her and keep on running. Well you better start running now, ’cause I’m done running and I’m done with you and that brat in there. And I’m gonna tell you something else, you stupid little prick. When I’m gone, you’ve got nothing left and nowhere to go and you know it!” She ran outside and slammed the door behind her.

  Huller swirled his beer can and said nothing. Tears streamed down Wallace’s stubbly cheeks into the corners of his mouth. “It’s her all right,” he said softly.

  Huller looked at him while he folded the top of the paper.

  “It’s Canny,” Wallace said, his wet eyes straining at the words over the picture. His mouth struggled silently with each syllable.

  MISSING! SINCE AUGUST 30, 1980.

  CAROLINE ANNE BIRD. 18 MONTHS OLD.

  “What’s that say?” asked Wallace, pointing.

  “Caroline,” Huller answered, with a faint smile. “Caroline Anne Bird.”

  Wallace brought the poster close and peered inquisitively at it; then he frowned. “She said ‘Canny,’ so that’s how we always called her.” He glanced self-consciously at Huller. “She didn’t talk too good acourse.”

  Huller held out his hand for the poster.

  “Jest baby talk,” Wallace said.

  9

  It was ten o’clock in the morning. Huller was supposed to pick Alma up at the hospital at eleven. The kitchen was a shambles again. The girls had emptied the box of toys all over the floor, which was tracked with mud from the rain-soaked yard. The sun had come out, but too hard, too bright, too suddenly, like crazy laughter after tears.

  Canny was banging on the locked kitchen door. “Krystal’s hungry!” she called, with her mouth at the glass.

  “A couple more minutes!” Dotty yelled back. She lit a cigarette off Jiggy’s.

  “But she didn’t have breakfast yet!” Canny called. “And her pants’re all wet.”

  “I said in a minute, dammit!” Dotty hollered. Canny stood on her tiptoes and peered through the glass. Wallace looked away guiltily. Dotty got up and closed the curtain.

  “So, the whole thing’s timing,” Huller was saying more to himself than either one of them. “The phone call, the drop-off point, the pickup, and giving them the kid.”

  Dotty leaned close.

  Huller laid his cigarette pack on the table. “This here’s the car with the kid in it,” he said, pushing the cigarettes past his beer can. “This here’s the pick-up point. Check the dough,” he said, easing the pack alongside Wallace’s coffee mug. “Then let the kid out,” he said, pointing to the mug.

  Dotty frowned. She looked between the mug and the cigarettes. “Who’s driving?” she asked.

  “Pops.” Huller grinned. “He’s in the car with the kid. We’re here,” he said, pointing to the matchbook. “In the truck. Soon as the money’s …”

  “But he’ll get lost!” Dotty interrupted. “I told you how he gets lost.”

  Huller’s eyes flicked at hers. “No, he won’t,” he said firmly. “W
e’re gonna dry run this a few days ahead.”

  “He’s not gonna remember!” Dotty groaned.

  “Look! Everything I say, you gotta argue with, and I’m getting sick of it!” Huller snapped. He wiped the sweat from his neck with a dirty dish towel, then threw it down on the table.

  “I’m sorry,” Dotty said. “It’s nerve-racking, that’s all. Jesus, every time I even think about cops, I get sick inside.”

  “Well don’t think about cops then. Think about all that money.” Huller smiled and puckered his lips at her. “All those soft green dollar bills …” He glanced quickly at Wallace and his smile faded. “What’s the matter, Pops? You scared too?”

  Wallace nodded. He started to say something, then shook his head weakly.

  “Say it … c’mon!” Huller gestured with his fingers. “Get it out! Now’s the time.”

  Wallace shrugged uneasily. Huller gestured again.

  Finally, Wallace said, “If’n we ask for money, don’t that mean we … we’re like kidnappers?”

  Huller snorted. “Well you are, aren’t you?”

  Wallace’s eyes went wide. “Not real ones. Not like on TV or nothing.”

  Huller bit his lip. “Oh yah? How do you figure that?”

  “We didn’t do it on purpose,” Wallace said. He shrugged and glanced almost shyly at Dotty. “The tailpipe was loose and we stopped and I said, ‘We ain’t got no money and no food, and we gotta head back.’ And then she took off, I guess for money, but, acourse, then I thought she just took off and I was gonna too, but she took the keys and then she was back with a little tiny girl in her arms and a jar of dimes. And I said, ‘Who’s that?’ And first she said how she found it, and then she said some lady paid her to take it, and, acourse, she was scared and she kept saying, ‘Just go! Just go!’ Course, I was so scared too.…” Even now his face was papery white and his voice trembled with fear.

  Dotty laughed nervously. “He’s got a thousand versions. Every time, he tells it different.”