When We Disappear

by Lise Haines

  “And …”

  “And then I was going through a particularly rough time—maybe not too different from what you’re going through now—and she did everything she could to get me to go see this palm reader named Honey over in Loxahatchee.”

  “But you’ve said Alma has a way of reading people. …”

  “You know, it’s like doctors, they like to consult one another. And Alma can be pretty assertive when she wants to be. Before I knew it I was looking into Honey’s eyes, and what do you do when you know, without a doubt, that you’ve met the one? Honey was willing to take me whole cloth. She knew about Alma, so we never could get married, but we lived our own kind of common-law marriage.”

  “So they both know?”

  He shook his head. “Alma’s too possessive, and I’m afraid she has a devotion to the pope. Divorce would have been too hard for her. There were times I came close to telling her. I might have breathed easier if I had. You know, you read about these men who have two families and how it’s just second nature to them. They have it all worked out in their minds. But it’s never been that way for me. I guess all I can say is that some secrets keep our families safe and some cause too much sorrow.”

  I didn’t realize I had my mouth open until a small bug flew in, maybe a mosquito, and I began to cough and couldn’t stop coughing. Sor went into the bathroom and ran the tap.

  I sat dumbly there after draining the glass, not knowing what to say.

  “Join us downstairs when you’re ready for a nightcap,” he said. “I’ll show you around the property tomorrow and we’ll talk some more.”

  It was pitch black out when I came down to the living room. I had written a letter to Liz after a long soak. Sor and Honey were sitting at the dining table. The surface had been stripped bare except for a bottle of cognac and three glasses.

  “You’ve joined the world of the living,” Sor said.

  I dropped into a chair across from Honey and rested my hands on the table. They were rubbery and wrinkled from the bath. She poured the drinks. We talked about her grove manager, who had a son with cancer. They were thinking about the best way to help the family. When I expressed my sympathies, Honey reached over and held my hands, as if to say she appreciated my good thoughts. I was surprised when she asked to look at my palms.

  I laughed and said, “I think I soaked too long.”

  “She wants to read your lines,” Sor said.

  I don’t know if I had ever said this outright to Sor, but just about anything related to divining the future, well, that stuff spooks me. It’s not that I necessarily believe any of it, but it’s possible for a prediction to sit in the back of your brain and work on you over time. I’ve seen that happen to people. I had one client who tripled her life insurance policy after talking with an astrologer.

  “Your immediate dilemma is family and home,” Honey said.

  I wasn’t going to spoil her moment, but if you know a man has been away from his family and his city for a long time, it didn’t take a lot.

  “As much as you want to be with the people who matter the most, you’re strongly attracted to travel, exploration—maybe the idea of running off, running away. There’s a woman who’d be happy to help you do just that if you decide to. But your biggest fear in life is about doors shutting and locking. She can’t help you with that. You’re worried that your wife will drift.”

  Sor must have realized what this was doing to me because he started to interrupt her.

  Then I jumped up and said, “I’m going to get some air.”

  Outside a motion sensor clicked on and lights flooded the drive. I began to walk, and the lights shut off after a while. I followed the line of the drive. It would be easy to keep going, and I began to understand how worn I was. The things that had fascinated me as a young man were too much for me now. The world of carnies and soothsayers, Alma’s truth-telling apples, Honey’s palm reading tricks. The light from the barn cast elongated shadows that looked like people lined up. My head was swimming.

  Maybe it was the waves of heat coming off the drive, the cognac, or the night thick and oppressive with cicadas. I was pissed at Sor for getting me into this jam. What the hell would he say to his wives and children and grandchildren when all of them gathered at the hospital? Had I been invited down to speak on his behalf or worse, to referee? I considered Alma’s survival hinging on the sale of dollhouse furniture. I didn’t know why the old man was binding me up this way. I had my own troubles. My intestines began to twist.

  I wasn’t paying attention to how far I had gone when I was aware of the lights flaring up behind me. Turning and peering in the direction of the house, I saw Sor’s figure in the entryway, waving for me to come back. I took my time at first, listening to the sound of my shoes and the low wind. It’s possible I heard something like a snarl, though I didn’t know what types of cats prowl in the Everglades, if any, and if they bother with citrus orchards. Peering into the dark, I wondered if it was only a wind machine starting up. I straightened and tried to formulate the conversation Sor and I might have to help him understand my limitations.

  He left the spot of light and started to move toward me, and then he was running. I could see something was wrong, and I broke into a run too. I realized in that moment that there was no hat. Sor didn’t exist without his hat. More sounds I didn’t recognize echoed through the orange groves and up under the live oak. I couldn’t run fast enough. It was Honey, not Sor, trying to reach me.

  “I called an ambulance. Hurry.”

  Sor was slumped over the table, his hat knocked from his head. I checked his pulse, his breath. Nothing. I managed to shift him around so he was on the floor, on his back. I performed CPR.

  The ambulance seemed to take forever, and when it finally arrived the siren came in long, slow stretches toward the house. Honey put her hand on my back, but I wouldn’t stop until the EMT guys made me stop. I looked at his face drained of color, the thin wisps of white hair. I picked his hat off the floor and dropped it in the center of the table.

  I grieved for him and for all the other losses. I missed my family too much, and I was deeply aware that everything can go in a second.

  They transported his body to the nearest hospital, a small building marked clearly on the map Alma had supplied.

  I talked Honey through the process of signing papers at the hospital. And in the long vigil I kept with her that night, while her daughters were flying in to be with her, she talked on and off and sometimes wept quietly or got up to look out the living room windows as if Sor was about to appear in the drive. I made coffee and rubbed her hands and listened.

  I worried that in the next few days there would be not only a body to bury but also a man to somehow lay out and divide.

  The next morning I made plans to break the news to Alma. I called my employer. I called the airlines to postpone my flight until after the funeral.

  “I should tell you that my girls don’t know about Alma,” Honey said as she handed me a thermos of iced coffee the way Sor liked it. I nodded to say I understood.

  When I got to the truck I realized Sor and I had forgotten the lunch Alma had packed. The cab was filled with flies and the stench of sour food. I was surprised some animal or other hadn’t crawled up inside it. I found the trash barrels and then I got on the road, the hot air and bad smell running riot over me.

  It was on the way back to Clewiston, in the smoke and raw sweetness of Belle Glade, past the boarded-up stores and homes, that I began to hear the roughness of Sor’s voice in my head.

  Alma was torn apart by his death. When she couldn’t stop crying I convinced her to try one of his sleeping pills so she could lie down and get some rest. The house felt smaller than it had on my first visit, the air closer, and once again I was looking at their daughters’ high school trophies from years back, their ruffled bedspreads.

  I turned out the lights and spoke softly over the phone so Alma wouldn’t arrest out of sleep in the other room. The walls wer
e thin, and sounds carried easily through the open windows.

  “Liz?” I said. “Sorry to call so late.”

  “What’s wrong?” she said.

  “Sor didn’t make it. I’m going to stay for the funeral.”

  “You poor thing. Where are you?”

  “With his wife, Alma, in Clewiston. Yesterday morning we were riding around in his truck, and now …”

  “I feel so awful saying this, and I do want to hear everything, but can I call you tomorrow? They’ve been working on the rails all day with heavy pneumatic equipment. I just haven’t gotten any sleep, and I have to make a parent-teacher conference with Lola before school starts. It takes longer coming from Chicago, and …”

  “Yes, tomorrow, of course. I’ll be eager to hear about Lola’s report. You get some rest.”

  “I’m really sorry about Uncle Sor.”

  Slipping the phone into my pants pocket, I went as quietly as I could down the hall and through the living room. Smacking a leg on the coffee table, I stood there hunched over for a moment. I listened intently, but Alma didn’t stir, and I was out the door, out under the stars, watching a car go by on the far road.

  Edie had told me to call at any hour, but I must have woken her. “Richard,” she said in a dreamy way.

  “I should probably call tomorrow.”

  “Talk to me,” she said.

  “I want to hear what’s going on with you,” I said.

  Edie told me about some minor trouble her son had gotten into at school and how her ex was only making things worse. She was taking a gardening class, and there was some thought about Europe next year, touring the grand gardens. Her sister had had a bad mammogram and was going in for a biopsy. Finally she said, “There are days when I wish I had become an astronaut.”

  “I don’t—”

  “So I could look at the Earth and gain some distance on things.”

  I told her about losing Sor and the discovery of the legal and common-law wives.

  “I don’t envy you telling Alma there’s more than one of her,” Edie said.

  Eventually I got to the palm reading fiasco and the concept I’m afraid of: doors locking me out. “Or maybe it was locking me in,” I said.

  “Was she right?” Edie said.

  “Probably. I don’t know.”

  Edie said I sounded awfully tired and suggested I go back in and stretch out on the bed, where I could whisper to her.

  I crept through the house again and up to the room where I was staying.

  “Don’t even bother to undress. Prop the pillows and put your ear against the phone so you don’t have to hold it. I’ll be here until you think you can fall asleep. Tell me anything. Or rest. Whatever you feel like. Imagine I’m curled around you. Imagine I’m holding you.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Shhh,” she said. “I know.”

  I should have thought about the phone, burning up time, but I had lived for so long now as a careful man. I was bereft. And so I stopped and listened to Edie’s voice and felt the air, maybe one degree under hot, push through the window, and I couldn’t say anything. But I kept going over Sor’s divided life. And what scared me was thinking maybe I knew what that’s like.

  I was torn down the middle and couldn’t fit the parts together anymore. The boy who’d learned how to guess in a carnival midway was somehow supposed to be connected to the man about to bury his teacher. The good earner and the seller of cheap trinkets were one and the same. I was once a man who knew how to walk with a golf bag slung over one shoulder, joking about the good life. And now I would gladly take a job carrying anyone else’s clubs. I would spend all day washing golf balls or hunt them in the rough to sell for pennies apiece.

  It was still dark out when I heard a faint pulsing signal and realized Edie had hung up. I picked the phone up, and the light from the screen filled the room. I was startled to see Mona there in jeans and a T-shirt, a camera around her neck. She was looking through the desk drawers, searching the bookshelf, pulling books out and letting them drop to the floor. Finally she turned and saw me there. She came over and sat down next to me. I froze up.

  “Mom is …” she began in a clear, ringing voice. I lay still so I wouldn’t miss a word.

  “Mom is what, Mona?”

  Her expression was unbroken.

  “Mom is what?”

  When Mona began to fade, I saw that the books were still on the shelves, the desk drawers shut. But I felt as if I had been gone through, rifled with. All that day my mind would return to the dream and the need to get home. It had been two full years.

  Alma woke with a terrible headache. Her eyes were swollen and downcast when she came into the kitchen. She insisted on making the breakfast. She said she would call her daughters, arrange for a funeral home, and so forth. “I guess I should call the hospital first,” she said.

  Before she could ask which one, I said, “Everything happened so fast. I gave him CPR until the EMTs arrived. I had your list of hospitals.”

  “Where were you when it happened?”

  I hesitated, and she saw I was wrestling. I knew she would find out soon enough. If some hospital worker didn’t tell her, the medical records would. Honey had signed all the paperwork as his wife. I guess we hadn’t thought that through very well. Alma squinted like the room had flooded with light when I told her there was someone else, another woman, another family.

  “That’s impossible,” she said.

  She asked the woman’s name, and when I told her I believe Alma stopped breathing for a full minute.

  Finally she spoke in a measured way. She told me she had been troubled by her father’s death for many years. Her family had been guest farmers, itinerant workers, in the cane fields of Belle Glade. He had died of heatstroke when he wasn’t allowed to have a drink of water all one day because of some minor infraction. He was working out in the summer sun until he dropped. She drove over to Loxahatchee to get some advice from this palm reader named Honey she had heard about. Alma said she wasn’t expecting a rich woman to do her reading, but Honey seemed nice, offering her lemonade and little sandwiches when she arrived.

  “She wouldn’t accept any money, and she looked me directly in the eyes and told me my father had finished his time on earth and was on his way to heaven. It put my mind at ease, you know? I no longer saw him coming down the hallway at night or sitting out by the tree swing. The next week I sent Sorohan off with a homemade cake to return the kindness she had shown me and hoped she might be able to help him as well.”

  I didn’t say anything, just listened.

  “I don’t know what kind of nephew you are,” she said, as if she were finally able to steel herself for what was ahead, “taking my Sorohan away and coming back like this. But I want his body returned to me for a proper Catholic burial in Clewiston, and I want you to make all the arrangements with the other person. And then I will be happy never to see or hear from you again.”

  Mona

  I had just pinned up some prints to dry—the drying machine was acting up again—when Geary asked me into his office, crowded with boxes of photo paper and chemicals and cameras. I looked at the winterscapes newly tacked on the bulletin board. The snow had been thoroughly represented again that year by his Saturday-afternoon students. Snow with a cluster of red berries on a twig, snow piled at the end of a drive with a shovel stuck in it, snow and the impressions left by sled runners, snow falling into Lake Michigan, snow landing on a boy’s tongue.

  “You look tired,” he said.

  “I’m tired of looking at snow,” I said.

  “There’s a competition I’ll be on you about. It carries cash awards for the winner and two runners-up. You need to be doing this kind of thing.”

  I don’t know why I resisted.

  And then he told me, as he often did, how great it was that I was investing the time to really learn print photography from film. Geary was always pushing against the digital tide despite being thick with digital equip
ment and computers, with two large-format printers. He wanted me to embrace the work of Weston and Cartier-Bresson, Parks and Avedon, Bourke-White. … He said over and over that it was essential that I think archival. I believe archival was his favorite word.

  As much as I loved the man, I wanted to say that the world is no longer archival. We’re apocalyptic now, Geary.

  Tipping back in his wooden swivel chair, he put his hands on his extended belly—a condition he enjoyed blaming on Lettie’s rich cooking.

  “Adjusting any better to the new neighborhood?” he asked.

  “A guy was shot and killed in the park last week.”

  He pushed to the edge of his seat. “I hope you know you can always call us for anything. Is your father sending money?”

  “I don’t think so. I’ve got an interview at the comic book store on Howard soon. A friend works there, so she’s pretty sure I’ll get it,” I said. “It would only be part time, so I can keep on top of things here.”

  He placed his Hasselblad in front of me on the desk and dumped a handful of black-and-white film into a bag. He referred to cameras like this as honest machinery. He knew I had wanted to try a Hasselblad for a while now “You have this on loan for three weeks. Think about making a visual statement of an obsession.”

  I laughed. “I guess the assumption is that we all have one.”

  “One of mine is this camera. But it takes getting used to.” Demonstrating the release, he popped it open and handed it back to me. The viewfinder sits on the top of the camera, so it’s necessary to look straight down to see the image. Everything appeared upside down, the image split in two.

  Before I could express my gratitude he said, “We have someone coming in for a shoot. Why don’t you look the part of the busy assistant?”

  My phone rang just then. I apologized but looked at the number, saying, “It’s my mom.”

  She wasn’t a frivolous caller anymore, so I knew to answer.

  “I have to get something upstairs. Come up and get me when you’re ready,” he said, tipping out of his chair. “Simple, clean background today. Let’s try gray, nothing fancy.” Around the studio Geary had several rolls of background sheets strung up along the ceiling and various pieces of furniture and props for most occasions.