When We Disappear

by Lise Haines

“She’s only a friend. You’re ripping my heart out of my chest,” he said.

  Richard

  The dollar store was in one of the older malls in Atlantic City where I got hired to work 28 hours a week. I thought I’d find something better than I could in Newark. But the job market got pulled into the pit along with all those foreclosed homes, so I worked at the mall as a stopgap.

  I stood at the register ringing people up, sometimes glancing at the nail salon across the way, watching the two Vietnamese women filling tubs, turning on back massagers, and bending over tough feet. But mostly I kept my head down and sold plastic butterflies with suction cups on their abdomens, pill containers marked Sunday through Saturday, ketchup and mustard squeeze bottles, and enough wind chimes to fill the whole world with the sound of tin striking tin.

  Some men browsed the store, and they tended to buy small electronic things, but most of the shoppers were women. A lot of them collected Social Security, and you could see where hair dye needed a fix or their plastic purses or shoes were cracked along the seams. Plenty of mothers came in with their kids and bought toys stockpiled from China, many with unknown safety records. I was asked to come over for dinner or meet up somewhere for a beer when I got off work by a couple of them, but I always said I had to get home to my wife and kids. Night after night I started to dial Edie’s number but stopped short.

  I didn’t have enough to rent another place, but it was a mild winter. I lived out of a backpack I got at a secondhand store. I bought a cheap sleeping bag and pad, and I used the alarm clock on my phone. Most nights I walked until I found a safe spot to shut my eyes. Some nights I spent in Laundromats.

  I thought of Mona sleepwalking at night, wondering what she was trying so hard to find, scared half to death that she’d leave their apartment building in her sleep. Before I left Newark, I got more of her postcards—terrible images that kept me from getting any rest.

  There were homeless shelters, but I heard about stabbings. I also got wind of the city’s habit of rounding people up and dropping them off in other districts like those no-kill rodent traps where you drive to a park in someone else’s neighborhood and let your rats go. I couldn’t be certain that this was true, but I wasn’t about to take a chance, so I did my best to stay out of sight. Someone pointed out a soup kitchen.

  I was as hungry for home as I was for three solid meals, but I knew I had to be patient. I wrote long letters telling Liz I was still with the insurance company, only they had made a severe reduction in my hours—and I was doing some traveling, widening my area. She wasn’t a letter writer, but together, over the phone, we got angry with the bastards. I got her to agree that I should hold on as long as I had work, at least for now—see if I could pick up something else to supplement the income loss. Sometimes it seemed she had given up on me, but then she’d say we would get through this just like everything else. I should have unraveled the shame and just told her.

  Standing at the register one day, ringing up customers, I heard my phone go off. Tina, one of Uncle Sor’s kids, had left a number for me to call. She was only a couple of years younger than me, but we had never met. I called back on my break, sitting on a bag of Styrofoam peanuts headed for the recycling center, wondering if I had lost Sor along with everyone else. I had not been good about keeping in touch.

  “Elizabeth gave me your number,” Tina said. “My father wants to see you. He’s going in for open-heart surgery on Monday. Quadruple bypass. Can you go down and see him?”

  I swallowed hard, thinking about the old guy. Tina was calling on a Thursday, and once I got off my shift I had to be back at work on Sunday, and I had just wired my paycheck to Liz. “I really don’t know how to say this, Tina. Your father … I love your father. But I’ve been hit by hard times. I don’t even have the bus fare right now.”

  “I see. I understand. My husband and I talked this over just in case. We have airline miles saved up, so we’ll get you a plane ticket. I’ve done this before with my kids. My dad really wants to see you, Richard. I live in Oklahoma, and Linda is in Los Angeles. We’ll be there next week for the surgery. But I’m afraid no one will be able to meet you at the airport. My mother doesn’t drive.”

  It stung me to think Tina was doing for a grown man what she had to do for her kids. But she read out the schedules and said she would make arrangements. I went to my locker as soon as I was off work and took everything I had to the Laundromat and used the one-hour cleaners next door for my suit. I grabbed a shower and shave at the city rec center, where I had gotten to know one of the evening guys at the desk. I had offered to look over his insurance bills for him once and told him how he could save a lot of money each year. He let me use the facilities if I came in during the last hour and was quick about it.

  When I got on the plane I was drowning in a black suit that had once been tailored to my body. But I had held on to a belt, and that kept my pants on.

  By four in the morning I landed in Florida and took a bus to Clewiston, a former sugarcane town with an area of four and a half square miles. I’ve never slept so hard as I did on that bus ride. For months I had lived with the knowledge that a cop could drag me out of an abandoned structure or alleyway and throw me in jail for vagrancy or that I could be rolled or stabbed or God knows what—I’d heard all sorts of stories.

  I awoke to find a text from Edie. She wanted to know how I was doing. She wanted me to come visit. She wanted me to know that she had me on her mind. I realized she had sent this note late at night. I didn’t like to text, but I didn’t want to use up my phone time and I didn’t want her to feel sad about getting in touch. I sent her a quick note saying I was seeing my uncle in Florida and would call when I got back.

  In Clewiston I found empty stores, overgrowth, and endless humidity. I rolled up my suit jacket, placed it at the top of my pack, and hiked from the station. The sky was loaded with clouds that grew both dark and bright at the same time. The asphalt was hot and shimmered, and the smell of tar made my empty stomach queasy. I kept to the sidewalks and shoulders as much as I could so the tar wouldn’t burn into my shoes.

  I stopped at the small clapboard house with a screened-in porch and low fencing. The garage door was open, and there I could see his old carnival booth knocked down into sections, the bright red standing out against the long, flat green and yellow landscape. It rains a couple times a day in Clewiston, and as I stood there, overcome with memories, the sky let loose. Two hounds ran toward the gate and started barking, and a man emerged from the screen door, letting it flap shut behind him. He called to the dogs to quiet down.

  “There you are,” he said. And then he shouted into the house, “He’s here!” Running toward the steps to keep the rain from ruining my suit pants, I was startled by how much he had aged. His cheeks were fat and thick with lines, and his belly pushed out. A newer hat, like the one I recalled, sat on his head. He shook my hand. The warm, leathery grip had turned soft.

  “So glad you could make it,” he said and opened the screen door wide. I was about to set my backpack down when he reached to take it. I didn’t let it go at first, worried about the strain. But he pushed against my arm so I’d release the pack and swept it into a back bedroom, saying, “Go on into the living room.”

  Aunt Alma embraced me for a moment, touched my face as if she was blind and hoped to learn my features. “What a fine nephew I have,” she said. Alma was a short, solid-looking woman with large eyes and uneven pigmentation. Dark cloud shapes seemed to float over the land of her lighter skin. She wore a skirt, a hand-stitched blouse, and several strands of beads. I guessed she was in her late sixties like Sor. “Bathroom’s halfway down the hall to your left. I set out a washcloth and hand towel.”

  Once I had freshened up, I joined them, and Sor said, “So you finally got to meet Alma.” He put an arm around her waist and kissed her cheek with tenderness. I expressed my pleasure in getting to know her and asked about my cousins.

  “Tina works as a bookkeeper. Linda has the
good life.” Alma raised one eyebrow. “I think she sits around the pool too much, but Sorohan tells me I’m just jealous.”

  When they set out platters of food, they wouldn’t let me help. I was told to sit at the head of the table and wait. Across from me was a television and over this a picture of Jesus. Dish by dish, a great meal appeared. Homemade enchiladas, tamales, chile rellenos, chicken mole, rice, beans, tortillas, and salad. She must have cooked for two days. Alma said, “Welcome.” Then she did a blessing, and we dug in. I ate with my head down, not letting a thing in the world distract me, even the intense spiciness of the food. Finally Sor reached over and touched my sleeve, saying, “She’ll fill out your clothes if you aren’t careful.”

  “I couldn’t slow down.” I laughed. “That was too good.”

  “And for dessert …” Alma said. She reached over to a bowl of fruit on the credenza, plucked out an apple, and drew a paring knife from one of the drawers. We watched as she made a slit near the stem. I thought she was going to pare it so that the skin formed one long, circular slice. I had seen my mother do this many times when I was a boy. Instead, Alma made a second slit, a third and fourth, and so on, gradually lifting off minuscule sections of peel as one might make an intricate carving on a pumpkin. We were quiet as she worked away. I had tried one of those professional carving kits that came with the miniature tools one Halloween to impress Lola and to entice Mona to join in. It was good that Lola was such a tiny girl and that Mona was too busy to care. I had no skill whatsoever and should have left the carving to Liz.

  “Alma used to be with a small circus,” Sor said. “An Italian man, a roustabout, taught her, and he learned from his grandmother, who had been a fortune-teller. The knife has to be kept particularly sharp. I bought a knife-sharpening wheel for her one Christmas.”

  “Best present I ever received,” she said.

  When she was done she handed me the apple with a face. It was my face but aged too much. It was a bitter face I hoped never to own. She didn’t see the man who had attempted over the years to stay young and fit, the energetic optimist hoping to please his wife and daughters, to always do well in insurance and keep on course, to pay the bills and load the car for vacations and clean the gutters out in the spring. This man wasn’t evident in Alma’s carving.

  I praised her skill but felt undone when she told me to eat the thing. I didn’t say that the apple frightened me, worried that eating this fruit would somehow make the picture come to life inside me. Finally, hoping to avoid a fuss, I bit into the eyes and nose, taking out half of that face, and swallowed hard. I had fallen into magical thinking being around Sor again.

  I hoped we were done, but Alma reached over and took another apple from the bowl. This one had a brown spot. Again we watched her carve. When she was done she set it on the table so that the face confronted me. I wanted to imagine it was someone else. Liz, perhaps. The young Liz I met when I worked for Sor that summer—I would have felt comforted thinking over that time. But I was looking at Mona’s face. The rotten spot covered her eyes like a dark mask with holes cut out.

  The heat of the food sitting in my stomach traveled into my skin and blanketed my entire body. “Who is this?” I asked Alma, as if I might hear something different from her.

  “That’s the truth teller. Now, go sit on the porch for a while,” Alma said.

  I felt disoriented, barely able to hear what she said next until she got to “Just don’t let your uncle drink too much. The doctors want him strong for the surgery.”

  This was the first time any of us had spoken of his heart, and Sor’s response was to pull a bottle from the liquor cabinet and set up three glasses despite Alma’s grimace. He poured one drink for Alma that he left on the table. I offered to help with the cleanup, but she shooed me away.

  It was still light out, and the humidity rose up, building into fresh clouds. Sor and I settled on the porch, and the dogs got up and shifted but seemed content to guard the house in a dog stupor. Insects sounded in the fields. A few other homes were spread out along the road we had come down, with another road off in the distance. “Alma has a small business selling dollhouse furniture,” he said. “And that’s doing well enough. She has a good eye and sound business sense, and we own our house outright.” They kept a vegetable garden going all year, and Sor said once he was on the other side of this medical business he could always pick up some kind of work.

  “You worried?” I asked. “About the surgery?”

  “Alma has a friend, a nurse over at the hospital. She thinks I’m in good hands. We’ll see what fate has to say about it.”

  My uncle stretched his legs out, took a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, and offered me one. I thought about saying something. But what do you say to a relative you haven’t seen in over twenty years? It’s not like you can start lecturing. Maybe if I were going in for a quadruple bypass, I’d want a cigarette. I lit the match.

  “What was that business with the apple?” I asked.

  “I’m guessing it looked like someone in your family,” Sor said. “Maybe someone who has some truth to tell you.”

  “I don’t know about that, but it looked like Mona.”

  “Alma must have found a photograph in your wallet.”

  I reached for my back pocket.

  “It’ll be on your nightstand in the girls’ room, don’t worry.”

  “My aunt pickpocketed me?”

  “Did I ever tell you about Rubber Woman? She was with the first circus I joined.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “She liked to tell the audience that mystics had hypnotized her and turned her bones to rubber. I had never seen a better contortionist. Truth was, she was double-jointed and knew some yoga. But I kept thinking there was something more. Then someone told me. She had had two of her lower ribs removed.”

  “You’re making that up.”

  “And the man with ten thousand eyes. I told you about him, right?”

  “No.” I laughed.

  “He stood in a spotlight in the middle of this stage set up in a big old sideshow. His assistant blindfolded him and asked three people to come up and check that the blindfold was secure. The lights dimmed and the room filled with eyes, faintly glowing eyes everywhere. He had an assistant out in the audience who asked people to hold up certain objects or photographs. He described them with accuracy.”

  “That’s just hidden microphones.”

  “And the eyes?”

  “Monofilament.”

  “Wrong era.”

  “Wire or string, I don’t know.”

  “Ten thousand eyes on wire or string that you don’t see when you enter the tent? Eyes that open and close?”

  “Good old smoke and mirrors.”

  “Okay, so Alma pickpockets you when you walk through the door, and she works with the pictures in your wallet when she’s in the kitchen, and she listens to everything you’re willing to divulge about your life, and she studies your physicality with great care, and she looks at the suit you’re swimming in, and she thinks about your age and the gray that’s taking over your hair, and all the while you think she’s just serving up enchiladas and making small talk …”

  “Exactly.”

  “What I’m saying is there’s all of that and there’s the part I can’t discern, no matter how many times she does it. She might have cut Liz’s face into the apple or Lola’s. But she knew it had to be Mona’s. And by your reaction …”

  I took a long drag and watched the smoke sit in the heavy air for a moment.

  “Your wife says you’re working for a big insurance firm up in New Jersey.”

  I watched a car go past on the distant road. “That’s right,” I said.

  “But we both know that isn’t so.”

  I felt a little winded when he said this and tipped my whiskey back. He filled my glass again.

  “You’re standing all day and walking all night,” he said, eyeing my shoes. “And you’re feeling sick and l
onely for home, and what’s worse, you’re starting to feel sorry for yourself. I’d take you on the road with me, but I think those days are over.” He grew quiet, and I knew there was more. “Your real concerns aren’t about money, are they?” he finally said.

  I laughed. “Sor, I—”

  “I know you aren’t making ends meet. But you’ve been wrestling with something else for a while now. You might as well tell me.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “You might think that summer when we were on the road together was a small thing. But to me it was like having a son around. I love my girls, don’t get me wrong, but I always hoped we’d have more time to spend together, you and me.”

  “It wasn’t a small thing, Sor.”

  “I’m waiting, then.”

  “Not that I believe any of this circus magic.”

  “’Course not,” he said and took a sip of whiskey.

  “Mona and I became distant long before I left—well, she did anyway—and I think that’s had an effect on the marriage. Mona’s a serious sleepwalker. With Lola to look after and Liz’s work, I know this business of staying up late worrying over Mona has frayed her nerves.” I shifted in my chair and considered the sudden drop in light, the cars on the road turning on their headlights.

  “Your mother said you walked in your sleep for a while.”

  “I don’t remember that,” I said. “Huh. You know, we keep thinking Mona will walk out the door into traffic.”

  The outside light came on, and we heard Alma’s footsteps. Moths began to circle the light. She set out food and a fresh bowl of water for the dogs. They rushed to greet her, and then she went back inside. We heard the clatter of dishes and water running in the sink.

  “Mona and I were in a car accident when she was nine. Liz needed us out of the house for the day, so I took Mona over to the racetrack with me. Just something to do. She loved looking at the horses. I hit a long shot. So I took her out for burgers and a malted to celebrate, and we headed home. She was sitting in the front seat when it happened. I think the impact scared her more than anything. But since we weren’t really hurt I told Mona it was probably best not to tell her mother, that it might upset her since Liz was pregnant. Mona seemed to understand.”