How to Disappear

by Ann Redisch Stampler

  J gives me a worse look.

  I say, “Give it up. I’m not saying, ‘Hey, cool, dead guy.’ But what do you think he was going to do with that knife? I’m not getting raped by a drunk in a pickup.”

  “That was the general idea. That’s what I was stopping! That isn’t what I do for fun.”

  “I know. I’m not an idiot. You totally saved me.”

  “What are you doing with an ice pick?” He sounds like the vice principal of a reform school. My reform school.

  “Ladies’ self-defense. I’m not getting dragged off and praying for my life. I’m poking a hole in his eye.”

  “Poke! That was a poke? I had him close to unconscious.”

  “Like you’re upset I helped you clobber him?”

  “You don’t clobber people with ice picks.”

  “Fine! Gouge. Eviscerate. Dismember. And if you have to know, I think you did great, but he was a giant crackhead. I was going for his heart.”

  “You can’t do that!”

  “If it was him or you? Why not? You deserve to live, and he deserved to die—what’s wrong with that?”

  “I already had him on the ground.”

  “You saved me and then I helped save you. Can we please figure out what to do next?”

  He’s quiet. It looks like he fell asleep with his eyes open. “I take you home and you change how you look while I get rid of the car.”

  “I know the drill.” He has no idea how well I know the drill. If we broke into this Chevron’s padlocked restroom, I could come out looking different in no time flat. “What about you? You’re going to have black eyes and, wait a minute—”

  I reach over and push on the bridge of his nose.

  “Stop!” He’s all but yelling at me.

  “Noses have a very small window to get pushed back into shape. Do you want to hit an ER, or do you want to let me touch it?”

  “You know this how?”

  “Brawling boyfriend and YouTube.”

  He sighs.

  I say, “You’ll look kind of normal in maybe a week.” This is highly optimistic, but I don’t want him any more freaked out. If cops are out looking for a bruised white guy, he’d better call in sick. “I could do makeup for you.”

  J looks miserable. I’ve come up with a Boy Scout who doesn’t like to brawl. Even though he’s good at it. Even though he saved me.

  I say, “He was coming at me. Not that I think going to the police would be the best idea. But if they believed the truth, they’d hang a medal on you.”

  He puts his arm around my shoulders and kisses my head with his split lip. Romantic. No, really. His arm feels heavy and warm. The fact that it just beat the crap out of some armed guy who was going to hurt me isn’t lost on me.

  I hug him back. “Lucky for you, I was loaded for bear.”

  “Lucky for us, you missed his heart.”

  “Lucky for him.”

  Before he drops me off, he leans across and kisses me again. It’s a there’s-no-tomorrow, soldier-off-to-fight-intergalactic-war, train-leaving-the-station-in-the-rain-and-everybody’s-crying kiss.

  He says, “I’ll be back. Don’t go anywhere.”

  “You won’t recognize me.”

  “I’ll recognize you fine. And I’m sorry. This was my fault.”

  “I told you, it was his fault.”

  “It was stupid. I shouldn’t have let you get out of the car.”

  “You’re not in charge of me! You don’t let me do things and not let me do things and push me around! Who do you think you are?”

  “The ass who took you to the scene of the crime and committed the crime.”

  “So we shouldn’t have gone there. I get it. You shouldn’t have picked it, and I should have said, ‘What the hell?’ and we shouldn’t have opened our doors. But after that, it was totally him. He got what he deserved. That makes it self-defense. That makes it fine.”

  45

  Jack

  I had him down, and she stabbed him through the arm. There wasn’t a qualm, not a shred of hesitation. I had him on the ground, I had his knife arm secured. For all practical purposes, she was saved. It was over. Then she stabbed him.

  Maybe she couldn’t tell it was done.

  He was big and more than drunk. He could have been dusted. Don likes to sample any mind-altering thing anyone hands him. I’ve seen him try to walk through walls when someone gave him PCP.

  I’m the one who beat the drunk guy to a bloody pulp, not her, all but sitting on the guy, whaling on him without brakes.

  Maybe she’s right, and he was going to drag her off and rape her. Maybe he would have carved me up, and I wouldn’t have been alive to hear that her body turned up half naked in a field in Crothers.

  Either way, I did the job. And then she stabbed him. Damn. She’s who I should have known she was all along, but I wasn’t expecting to see her in action.

  I wait to blend into the morning’s highway traffic and ditch the car in San Jose. I pull off the license plates, wipe it down, and leave the keys under the seat. Then I buy an old Chevy with a FOR SALE sign in the window and a price that says it’s scrap. I look under the hood—Gerhard built a car from a kit while Calvin and I, age thirteen and in awe, stood there and handed him the parts—and it’s better than expected. I claim I’m going to the bank, walk around for twenty minutes, come back and slap some Manx cash into the owner’s hand.

  My beard is neatly trimmed. My hair has some crap in it that old guys use to cover graying temples, turning it the color of rotted-out rust. My face is plastered with the stuff Nicolette ran back out to the car and gave me, for people with nasty scars. I don’t see how girls can stand makeup. It feels like I’ve rubbed my face with scented crankcase oil.

  I try to convince myself that this is the classic all-American boy’s tale: boy meets bear; boy vanquishes bear; boy saves a princess in a tank top. I liked winning, even with the complicating factor of the princess stabbing the bear.

  I’ve spent my life not beating guys who were begging for it, all the while being trained to go for it. But I just kept punching. If she hadn’t stabbed him, I might have kept going until he stopped breathing.

  After driving around for a couple of hours, trying to calm down, my cell phone vibrating continuously, I pull over to talk to Don.

  He’s pissed, as usual, but I don’t have the patience for it.

  I say, “I hit a glitch. I had to deal with it.”

  “A glitch? Isn’t that when ladies are late because they couldn’t pick what dress to wear? You have trouble picking your dress?”

  “Fuck off. I had trouble ditching a car.”

  “What did you do with my car?” I enjoy him knowing that, in some ways, locked up in there, he’s helpless. I focus on that and not on worrying what he’ll say when he finds out his car’s been abandoned in the desert for a while.

  “You want me to do this? I can’t drive a red shitmobile with no muffler.”

  “You decide to do something, you get my permission!”

  “Will you listen? I got in a fight. I had to lose a car.” I’m thinking this is something Don could relate to, but I’m thinking wrong.

  “You got in a fight? What, the checker at Rite Aid overcharged you for gum so you bitch-slapped the bitch?”

  “It was a drunk guy in a parking lot.”

  “Shit. Were you drunk?”

  “No.”

  “Figures. Anyone see you?”

  “Besides the guy? Maybe. I don’t think so.”

  “Straight-A moron, aren’t you? Did I tell you to get in a fight or did I tell you to get your hands on her?”

  Maybe I am a straight-A moron, but I’m not letting him do this.

  “Answer me!”

  I don’t. But the playground rule that if you ignore the bully, eventually he’ll forget what he was taunting you about and go away doesn’t apply to Don.

  “Do you have her or don’t you? And the answer better be yes.”

  There’s
no answer from me for maybe a second too long.

  “Jesus,” he says. “You found her and you took her drinking, didn’t you? You found her, and you’re playing with her.”

  “No!”

  “What’s wrong with you? Fuck her after you off her—just finish this thing!”

  “What kind of perverted shit is that? What’s wrong with you?”

  “You don’t have the balls for this, do you? You’re gonna take her to the movies and ask her to prom.”

  “No!”

  “Where are you keeping her?”

  “I told you, I don’t have her!” Even to myself, I sound like a liar. “Nobody wants this over more than I do.”

  There are a couple of minutes of listening to Don’s uneven breathing and static. Finally he says, “You need to get your butt back up here.”

  “No.”

  “Jackass,” Don says. “This is real. Bad things are going to happen. Get in my car and get back up here and convince me to believe you.”

  “I told you, the shitmobile is history.”

  In a voice I remember from childhood, from when he was cornered with no way out, short of scratching a hole under his feet with his toenails, he says, “You need to be here. Right now. If these guys don’t think I have you under control, Mom’s the carrot and the stick. You’re disposable, and so am I. Get back here.”

  I want it not to be true. I want this to be Don offering up the same self-serving lies he tells regularly without blinking. I want this to be his effort to manipulate me like the little bitch he says I am. But I believe him, or close to enough to tell Nicolette a fairy tale to keep her at Mrs. Podolski’s while I drive to Nevada.

  I believe him, and I need him to know that so he won’t do some angry, stupid thing to show me how serious he is, and get us all killed.

  I say, “Yes, sirrrr,” in the exaggerated slur we used to use when we were sassing our dad behind his back.

  Don says, “Don’t you sass me, boy,” imitating the voice I haven’t heard for four years but that still gets me going—along with the guilt that I closed it down.

  46

  Cat

  I’m hunkered down with Mrs. P. Curtains drawn. Getting groceries delivered to the welcome mat. Watching TV and baking.

  I’m not waiting for him.

  I’m hiding out.

  Not feeling a tenth of the way safe.

  The Home Shopping Network doesn’t have news. Every time Mrs. P nods off, I grab the remote and hit up the local news on channel nine.

  Nothing.

  No armed assaults. No barroom brawls. No murders.

  I mean, somebody thought she saw a bear cub in a tree. That was news. They interviewed her for five minutes.

  If we killed the guy, it would have to be news.

  Where is J ditching the car anyway? Peru?

  I think he’s coming back.

  Maybe.

  I grill Mrs. Podolski lamp chops (into the yard for mint leaves, back in under ten seconds, world record) and return to the Home Shopping Network for an ongoing sale of loose gems. Mrs. P’s birthstone is the opal. Cat’s is aquamarine. My real one ought to be rubies.

  I keep coming back to bloodred.

  The brightest thing I wear now is beige, but bloodred is my signature color.

  Mrs. Podolski says, “The price of a good woman is above rubies. That’s a proverb for you, Cathy.”

  This might explain one or two things.

  By Thursday, Mrs. P is so sick of pastries, I have to stop rolling dough. When she grabs my hand with her little, liver-spotted fingers, I can’t believe her grip.

  “I’m going to read your palm, Ruby,” she says.

  For a second, I’m terrified she’s going to figure out who I am and why I’m in her living room by tracing the lines of my hand. Until I remember that nobody can do that. There are no real fortune-tellers or real witches or real bogeymen.

  Maybe bogeymen.

  I let her massage my palm with the tips of her fingers.

  Meet a dark stranger. Check.

  Go on a long journey. Check.

  She gets distracted by a mound of cubic zirconia on TV before she gets to long life.

  After a while, she’s so sick of me folding her afghan over her knees and waving my palm at her for the word on long life, she’s ready to throw me out of the house.

  She thinks I poisoned her coffee. When J finally shows up, tapping on the kitchen window, she thinks he’s come to arrest me.

  I want to hug him until my arms are too tired to keep hugging. But he swoops in and hugs me first. I’m enveloped in it. Also trapped. But all I feel is relieved.

  When he steps back, he looks me over like the vice principal checking for bra straps and too-short skirts and random inappropriateness.

  He says, “Good job! You look great.”

  I have black hair parted down the middle, black eyebrows, and red bow lips. I turned one of Mrs. P’s old thermal tops into a white waffle-weave shirt. Over a black skirt.

  Blah.

  But a different style of blah.

  “Like I looked terrible before?”

  “You were supposed to look different, that’s all I meant.”

  “Joking.” I reach up to touch where his cheekbone is swollen, but he pulls back. “You still look pretty beat-up.”

  I’m so glad to see him, it’s borderline pathetic. I tell myself I’d be happy to see a friendly dachshund. Facing the fact that I don’t like being alone. But it’s not the same thing. The dachshund wouldn’t have its paws under the waistband of my awful skirt.

  He says, “Can I get into the garage?”

  I start to hand him my key ring, but why? There isn’t any reason Mrs. P can’t see him. It’s not like she’ll remember. And what if she did? What if she told her totally indifferent son, Walter? I could go, No, Walter, it wasn’t my boyfriend, it was a praying mantis.

  The worst part is, it would be plausible.

  No, the worst part is seeing J with her. How sweet he is.

  I wish I could keep him. Bag him and drag him back to Cotter’s Mill. Go, Hey J, I’m not who you think—fooled ya! Wanna be my boyfriend?

  Pretend he never saw me stab that guy. Another episode of things that look like the fun kind of bad spinning out of control. Him spinning with me.

  He walks through the kitchen door like nothing happened. Like he’s my playmate with a half-assed disguise. Not my partner in what might have been a crime.

  I have to keep reminding myself that him-and-me isn’t real.

  That even if I don’t ever go back home (reality), if I accept that and go, Yay, new life with permanent bad hair and giant thighs (reality), he’d still be with a made-up girl.

  If I’m with anyone ever from now on, that person will be with a made-up girl.

  Mrs. Podolski yells, “Officer!”

  J says, “Can I get you more tomato soup?”

  He looks over at me, smiling at me, and I try to think about something other than the fact that at some point I’m going to have to shed Catherine G. Davis and never see him again.

  Such as, how weird is it that a lady who buries her silverware can still tell if her soup comes from a can or from a fresh tomato?

  And how hot J looks in oven mitts.

  I settle Mrs. P in front of the TV with soup and Sprite on her favorite tray (violets painted on a white metal background) and her favorite nighttime show (QVC selling handbags).

  Back in the kitchen, J is staring down my stash of Toaster Strudel and Oreos. The cupboard door is hanging open. If my life didn’t revolve around avoiding death every minute when he isn’t underfoot distracting me, I’d die of shame.

  “You don’t feed her this crap, do you?”

  “Constantly. If I stuff her veins with enough cholesterol, who knows, I could inherit that couch.”

  I swear he’s trying to figure out how many bags of Famous Amos chocolate chip cookies it took to pad my behind. Calculating how big I’ll be once I’ve emptie
d that cupboard down my throat.

  “Do you ever worry about malnutrition?”

  “Do you ever worry girls will smack you?”

  “I feel relatively safe as long as I outweigh you.”

  “Not for long.” I pull a box of Hostess Sno Balls from the cupboard, take out a Sno Ball, and bite into it.

  “Are we going to share?”

  “Nope.” But I hand him one, a pink one. I don’t even know why I eat this garbage when the kitchen’s full of things I baked.

  He says, almost casually but in a tight, tight voice, “I’m supposed to be in my cousin’s wedding. This is probably what they’ll serve. I was going to cancel, but maybe I should keep everything looking normal. You think?”

  This is it. The kiss-off. He leaves, and I’m out of here. I’ll call Walter from the bus, tell him to get another aide for Mrs. P. Fast.

  I say, “Classy. Where is it?”

  “South Dakota. The drive is going to take longer than the whole event.”

  “Come on. No bachelor party and rehearsal dinner and binge drinking with the bridesmaids?” (Camel chitchats while exiting oasis.)

  “Maybe the binge drinking.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow. I should be back by Monday. Tuesday if I’m passed out in a drunken stupor with a couple of bridesmaids.”

  Tomorrow?

  I feel something I’m not supposed to feel. Big-time. I make myself smile. My face is the kind of mask that doesn’t have tear ducts. “Help yourself. You want a drunk bridesmaid, go to. It’s not like I’m your girlfriend.”

  He looks relieved.

  I feel miserable. Resent that this wedding is cutting into my temporary true romance because I can’t do this again anytime soon. Gainesville, Florida next. Or maybe Pullman, Washington.

  I hate this. I hate that he can’t know Actual Me. Hate that I can’t go sneaking out with him in Cotter’s Mill. Take him to a party on the lake where Liv and Jody get to look him over, and Summer embarrasses herself with shameless flirting.

  I hate how not-normal and approaching expiration this and everything else is. I hate that I can’t keep him. I hate everything about this.

  Then he hands me a box.

  “What’s in here?”