When We Disappear

by Lise Haines

  Sor topped off our drinks again.

  “It wasn’t long after that that she began to sleepwalk. And then she just pulled away. It was all about her mom and her friends—everybody and everything else. … I was patient. But she never changed back.”

  He looked at me like I had left something out. But that was Sor, always lifting up rugs, looking for more. “I can tell you, from raising my own girls,” he said, “that they can make a turn at a certain point, either toward the father or mother. If it’s the mother, they start mimicking and looking for secrets and advice and ways to be—even if they fight with their mother. They’re a tribe, and we’re not members. It’s possible you’ve let this worry take over without realizing it.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” I said.

  “It’s easy to think that everything around you is about one moment, one event, but you know life isn’t like that. You need to be strong for your family, Richard, clearheaded. Tell me what happens when Mona sleepwalks.”

  “She gets up in the middle of the night, and sometimes she just goes into the hallway and stares at the photographs there. Sometimes she goes into the kitchen. I mean, she did when we had the house.” I began to feel a relief, talking with Sor. I let the whiskey ease my way. “She starts a funny conversation with herself, and at first I tried to answer, but they say not to wake a sleepwalker, so I just listen and watch to make sure she’s okay and that she gets back into bed. I’ve asked if she remembers anything, but she just shakes her head. Liz says Mona flies in her dreams. You know, like flying through the air. And she claims she wakes up in a new spot from the place where she fell asleep.”

  “I loved a woman once who flew at night …”

  I gave him a look, and he laughed.

  “You can be as skeptical as you want, but that won’t help you understand your daughter. I read a good deal on this subject at one time. In fact you might say I made a study of it. I learned that some Tibetans believe in mystics and dakinis that move across the sky. And some Native Americans and Hindus, they have flyers. Now, the Babylonians …”

  “The Babylonians?”

  “They thought we had a light body that could slip out of our heavy body,” he said, tapping his chest to signify what he meant by heavy. “And that light body just takes off into the air. There’s a whole world of people who believe they can fly from one place to another, dreaming or otherwise. Some of them end up in the carnival or circus. You know, they have a hard time fitting in the everyday world.”

  “Okay, I’ll bite. Where did this girlfriend of yours go?”

  “Her name was Donna, a real sweet woman who worked with a stage magician. We spent a couple of winters together. She helped me make the disappearing cabinet for you.”

  “Ah, the cabinet.”

  “A few states over her mother had been placed in a convalescent home—she had Donna pretty late in life. The sister lived nearby, so her mother was looked after, but Donna couldn’t get back there very often. So Donna would fly off and sit with her mother at night. She told me when we were breaking up that she sometimes visited an old boyfriend she couldn’t get over. I suspected as much, but what can you do?”

  I really loved this old guy.

  “On one of those nights I happened to reach over, and she was gone. I checked under the bed, all the closets. The windows were locked, and the front door had a chain lock in place. She had told me if this ever happened—if she went missing in the middle of the night—I should go back to sleep and not worry. But I couldn’t. I drove around the neighborhood for an hour or more and came back and checked every corner of that house again, securing the chain lock. I stayed up on the couch into the early hours. When the sun came up I was about to get on the phone and call her friends, call the police. Then I heard someone in the bedroom. There was Donna, sitting up in bed, still in her nightgown, cheerful as ever.”

  “I swear you make this stuff up,” I said.

  “If you’re struggling, maybe you’ll appreciate this one since it was documented in a famous journal. I have the issue if you need proof. A man in Ohio left his body one night and projected himself into his mother’s living room three towns over. He saw her watching a television show, and it was the very first episode of a new series. A while later he woke up back in his body in his own house, and he called his mother and described everything that happened in the show and what she had for dinner and who she talked to on the phone. And every last thing he described was correct.”

  “He could have watched the previews,” I said. “And maybe she ate the same meal every night and the only other person she talked to was her cousin who called at the same time day in and day out.”

  “I don’t think you ever really got that carnies, circus people—everyone from the grinders to the joeys to the bally—we’re a different breed. We depend on that one thing that can’t be easily explained. We feed off it. That’s our stock in trade. Just like any artist out there. That’s the thing you were drawn to when you met Elizabeth. And now you have a full-grown daughter who sees the world differently than you. She’s probably got as much wonder as your little one—even if she has some bitterness or anger. Her real world is about mystery. She hasn’t shut down. Not yet anyway.”

  I felt stung by his last remark and tried to shrug it off. “Most mysteries can be figured out,” I said.

  “I would give anything to send you back in time so you could watch Michelangelo paint the Sistine Chapel.” Sor rose to his feet and then stopped for a moment as if there was a pain shooting straight down through him. “So, I should demonstrate how to operate our crazy shower before we hit the hay.”

  I followed him inside. It wasn’t just the reversed hot and cold knobs. Sor had to show me what to do with the giant insects that had come up through the drain. “Welcome to Clewiston,” he said as he dumped them into a bucket they kept under the sink filled with some kind of noxious liquid.

  Sor and Alma turned in early, and I did as well after a very short shower. There were pennants and trophies and photographs from my cousins’ high school years in the bedroom where I slept. Both twin beds sagged in the middle. I picked the one closest to the window. There wasn’t any AC.

  It was strange to be in a bed in a bedroom. I had planned on writing a letter to Liz, but it felt as if a lifetime of fatigue pulled back the covers so I could slip in. As soon as I turned on my side and got comfortable, a breeze picked up for the first time all day. My door opened slightly and just as quick it clicked shut. Open, shut, open, shut. I couldn’t move to do anything about it. I couldn’t even open my eyes. Then I was out.

  I woke in the middle of the night when the door banged shut. It was so loud it felt like it slammed inside my head.

  I sat up and there was Mona. She was floating in the air.

  The walls, the bedding, even Mona and the dress she wore—everything was blue. She hovered there with her hair and dress fluttering, wind traveling through the room. She was barefoot and looked tired, as if she had come a long way. I felt certain she had something to tell me. I waited. She began to open her mouth. I waited for that one thing. But then, before I could reach out and stop her, she disappeared.

  I couldn’t sleep the rest of the night.

  Mona

  I often looked out at the trains, at the platform lights that mesmerized in order to get to sleep. As I drifted one night I saw a man on the tracks.

  Maintenance crews went out to check ties and repair sections of rail, but I had never seen them work solo. Then I got it, the vest, the way he stood, the shape of his head with that short-cropped hair. I turned the music off and sat up. I grabbed my camera with the telephoto.

  Maybe Ajay had climbed up the support beams, if that was possible, or jumped off the platform onto the rails. There was the third rail of course. Just looking at the warning sign between the tracks made me uneasy.

  On the other side of our walled yard was an underpass. In the daylight you could see the shimmer of broken bottles, the husk of a TV, o
ld mattresses, and snow heaped up on the western side, pushed there by the wind. At night the underpass was pitch black, as it was now. The trains came every five minutes or so, but I wasn’t sure when the last one went through the side where he stood. He looked directly at my window.

  I turned my bedside light on, shot out of bed, and made big arm movements, trying to get him to move off. He waved back, as if he thought I was saying hello. I felt the vibration and saw the lights of the northbound train. He was on the northbound side. It was still far enough away, but he wasn’t looking at it. I tried to get the window up to shout to him, but it was stuck, ice built up around the bottom edge. I was frantic to pry it open, pulling and pulling on it.

  I heard a scream and looked up again. Maybe it was one of those false sounds produced by the train, the way you can hear the phone ring when you run a blow dryer, but he was gone. The train was passing through that same section of rail.

  I rushed downstairs and knocked on Cynthia’s door. I found her with a plastic bag on her head, dying her hair again. I grabbed her by the arms and said, “He’s been hit!”

  “Slow down. Who’s been hit?”

  I pulled her into her bedroom. Raising the blind, we peered as far as we could see in both directions. “Ajay.”

  “You didn’t actually see it happen, right?”

  “He was standing out on the tracks. When I looked away …”

  “See any trains stopped? Hear any alarms? Sirens?” she asked. “It’s a big deal when they hit someone. You’ll know, believe me,” Cynthia said.

  The radiators were banging hard, the heat dizzying.

  “You sure?” I said.

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  In the kitchen she grabbed a burning herbal smoke out of the ashtray and took a drag. Studying me for a moment, she said, “What do you think he’s up to?”

  Another train passed, and I looked at a cluster of Hummels as they quavered on the shelf next to the sink. Cynthia was big on those figurines of children that hang out laundry on clotheslines, glide in skates, swing baskets on their arms. I think she liked the idea that they came close to breaking from the vibration but somehow endured. She still hoped to have her own child with Luke or at least share Colin, his son.

  “Just steer clear of the grandfather,” Cynthia said.

  “I’ll be gone by summer. Besides, Nitro keeps me busy.”

  She gave me a sympathetic look. “Nitro.”

  “Yeah, well … .”

  Cynthia nudged a slim book across the table. It had a plain black cover and gilt edges. “Better look through the section on dream analysis. Nitro’s been messing with you. When I read it I realized Luke is the train in my nightmares.”

  “And that makes you the tunnel?”

  “Riotous,” she said.

  Opening the cover, she thumbed through the pages, then read aloud, “An astral body is something like the vapors formed by a pot of brewing coffee. The aroma travels into the room, and if there’s an open window, it drifts away. The secret is in learning how to open the window.”

  “What if your window is frozen shut?” I said.

  “Exactly. I’ve tried every damn exercise in the book.”

  “And?”

  “I tried the one where you walk through walls.”

  “You’re cracking me up,” I said.

  She handed me the book again. “Flip to the back.”

  “You were trying to get through lathe and plaster?”

  “I tried levitation. I even tried the one where you project yourself into a cemetery.”

  “Calvary?” I asked. Mount Calvary was our neighborhood cemetery, around the curve on Sheridan, separating Chicago from Evanston. My father’s parents and grandparents were buried there. You could see one corner of it from our front windows.

  “I wanted to go to the one near Luke’s apartment in Brooklyn,” she said. Then she took the book out of my hands and pitched it across the room. Her eyes began to swim. “Children. Children are natural flyers in their dreams,” she said and broke down a little.

  But the cooking timer went off, and she pulled herself together and said, “I’m thinking of going pink this time. You know, that Lost in Translation look.”

  “That was a wig,” I said.

  “Oh, I caught up with my boss. He’s going to talk with you about the job as soon as he picks a day for you to come in. You should go online and learn every comic book figure that’s ever lived. I’ll send you some sites.”

  “I know how to run a cash register,” I offered.

  “Tell him that, and make your eyes big and dark like you’re starving for something, maybe conversation. He loves women who are capable but bereft in some way.”

  The timer went off, and Cynthia said, “I better get this dye out. A friend of mine had all of her hair break off when she left it in too long. We could watch that ghost-hunter show, and I could make a fresh pot of coffee when I’m done. It might help you sleep. Does me.”

  But I was too tired to stay up to get tired in order to fall asleep.

  The show we sometimes watched was about people chasing ghosts or other disembodied entities around abandoned prisons and hospitals and old hotels. The hunters tried to spot them with ultraviolet equipment, laser beams, and EMF meters. Sometimes they talked cruelly to the spirits to get them to move a chair or blow cold air down someone’s neck. That’s how they provided solid proof to the home audience that entities were present. Members of the team, the hunters, shivered and leapt around and wedged themselves into narrow crawl spaces where rusting pipes oozed foul-looking stuff. Sometimes a team member became so agitated and frightened he’d yell, Holy shit! or Crap! And that was bleeped out. One guy was known to run like a chicken with his head cut off when he got scared. Always good for a laugh.

  The ghosts in my life needed no detection equipment. They were all out in the open. I liked that my father’s disembodied spirit hovered far away. The ghosting of my mother was a different matter. When she had her studio she used to come in from the workshop after a couple of hours of welding or burnishing with that look of deep contentment. Sweaty and flecked with grime or metal dust, she would grab a cold drink and get right back out there. After Lola became a toddler and napped less often, it wasn’t enough to have a baby monitor. Mom’s time was more cut up, but she often set up little projects for Lola in her playpen in the studio while she sketched and planned and worked on grants or artist notes, as she had with me. She gave to us and to her work in a way that was unlimited.

  But in the Chicago apartment she became little more than raw, chafed energy, and I sometimes felt I was walking through her to get to where I needed to go. I worried that she would get worse if she couldn’t find a way to sculpt again.

  When I got upstairs and glanced at Lily’s door on the way to mine, I thought about her negatives and how I needed to find another moment when both she and my family were out.

  It was almost two in the morning when I pulled my covers off the floor and settled in. I watched YouTube videos of teens jumping down between subway tracks in New York City and scrambling back up before the trains arrived at the stations. I guess this had become a thing. But Ajay was older and didn’t strike me as a daredevil. He was taking care of an elderly family member and going to architecture school. You can lose balance or fall or get pushed, but he had been right there, across from my window, waving. I turned into my pillow like a dial clicking one more notch toward sleep.

  Usually if Mom couldn’t sleep she waited out the night with a pillow slumped halfway over her head, or she turned the TV on low or ate something while staring at the sink. As she nudged my door open now, I watched the photos I had pinned to my wall, each with a single pushpin, lift and settle in the draft. My mother stood there as if she wasn’t sure of her purpose. I couldn’t see her face that well in the platform lights. I reached for the bedside lamp, but she said, “Please don’t.”

  “Did you catch another mouse?” I said. We had had a steady run of rat
s that she preferred to call mice. I had gotten pretty good at placing smears of peanut butter on traps and setting the wires. Those were the only times I saw her get out of control. The last time she caught one she went on and on: I can’t believe I’m making you and Lola live in a rodent-infested apartment by the elevated trains. I can’t believe … I … It seemed more productive after that if I set the traps and emptied them when necessary.

  “No. I hope we’re done with them for a while,” she said. “Were you down at Cynthia’s?”

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  She drew the desk chair over. I watched the light on her face from the L. It made me think of the light from an arc welder, only softer, the way light can hit a face in old movies. She rubbed her lips with one of her thumbs, and I knew she had something difficult to say. I should have taken a picture of her like that. I should have blown it up to understand what I couldn’t know. Because sometimes, even when she told me what was going on, I was certain there was something else sitting just behind that admission, something hidden behind her bones.

  “The newspaper is folding. I didn’t want to worry you and Lola. But I found something else. Another job.” She had been trying to get a spot at a gallery for a long time, but her face didn’t reflect art gallery or a sense of relief. “I’m going to be cleaning out foreclosed homes. They’re called trashouts. You know, go through, get rid of any furniture, arrange to have appliances bolted down, repairs made, that kind of thing.”

  We both knew what that kind of thing was: every last piece of crap someone losing their home was happy to leave for the lending agency that had fucked them over. It was the kind of garbage one cooked for the banks, for Wall Street. It was the trash too many of us wished we could deliver to their doorsteps. I had read that some people left messages written in their own excrement on the walls on their way out.