When We Disappear

by Lise Haines

  “I’m having trouble finding someone to help me move a couch and a washing machine,” Mom said. “I tried doing it myself when the other worker didn’t show, and I ended up wedging the couch in the front doorframe, where it’s stuck. I can’t leave until I get it in or out and the lock-box back in place.”

  She had to repeat bits of this several times because of the phone reception.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  “Saw … off,” I heard. “… have to find a hardware …”

  “Saw what off?”

  “Legs. The couch legs,” she yelled.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “You’ll have to walk over … Lola up and take … dance cl—” By the time I heard her say, “Sorry,” her voice was the sound of a firecracker that hadn’t yet exploded.

  I unrolled a couple of backdrops, moved the lighting around with Geary, did some cleanup in the darkroom, and was on my way. I wrapped the leather case of the Hasselblad in my wool scarf and nestled it in my pack. Two or three inches of new snow covered the ground. The way it was coming down, I wondered if we were going to have a blizzard.

  I took off along Church Street. My running shoes quickly soaked through, the cold stinging my feet. Turning on the iPod Cynthia had loaned me, I dug my wool hat out of my pocket and put it on as I watched cars swerve and stall in the streets. Everyone seemed in a hurry to make it to schools for pickups and stores for provisions before things got worse. I rushed to Lola’s school, hoping to make it a little early so she wouldn’t worry if she didn’t see Mom out front.

  The walk to the dance class was a little far. When we arrived, Lola discovered that no one had helped her remember her leotard and footless tights. She was devastated. The dance teacher said, “Go ahead and join in, Lola. It’s all right. Just take your socks off.”

  “I’ll be watching,” I said.

  The look Lola gave me as she reached the dance floor. The instructor turned to me and said, “Are things okay at home, sweetheart?”

  I began to stuff things back into Lola’s bag as I tried to figure out why I was this woman’s sweetheart.

  “Your mother usually comes in.”

  “She had to work late,” I said.

  “Be lions, girls! Be lions!” the teacher called to them.

  The girls moved and stretched toward the long sets of mirrors. I saw Lola turn to a small girl in a shiny green leotard and roar into her face. The girl yelled, “Stop it!” and the teacher went over and moved Lola to the other side of the room, then whispered something in my sister’s ear. I thought it best if I didn’t interfere.

  Returning to our conversation, the teacher balanced on one foot now, the sole of her other foot flat against her inner thigh. “Your mother has always paid us on time, and she promised she’d bring a check today. We do give Lola a sizable scholarship. It seems important to your sister to keep her lessons up.”

  Lola shot me another look. It wasn’t as if she could overhear, but maybe she sensed that I was ruining things for her. Matters were always different when it was about Lola. I felt helpless.

  “I’ll go ahead and watch from the observation window,” I told her teacher. “I’m sure our mom will mail in a check right away.”

  Each new humiliation was about the debt our father had accrued.

  When we got home I suggested to Mom that we do something special for Lola.

  “The drive-through has dip cones now,” Lola said knowingly. She loved the idea that you could just drive up to a window and someone would hand you a meal with a dessert, a toy, a crown, a special decorated box with games printed on the bottom and punch-out game pieces, and maybe a top to spin and spin until you lost yourself.

  Once we were lined up outside, I checked to see if we needed additive. Lola took the backseat, where we’d had a new seatbelt mechanism installed. I sat shotgun. Mom turned the engine over. I waited to see what would happen when she eased the clutch out and gave it a little gas because this often didn’t work out well for her. But she managed to engage, and we were about to pull away from the curb when Ajay appeared in my side mirror.

  This was the first time I had seen him since the night on the rails. As he approached my door, Mom got startled and let her foot off too soon, and we jerked forward. She slammed on the brake; I let out a muffled scream; the van died, barely tapping the car in front of us. Lola’s bobble-headed snowman on the dash went into furious motion.

  “Mom.” Lola laughed in that way that can turn to tears.

  “Hold on,” Mom said. “Everything’s okay.”

  I rolled down my window, and Ajay looked to see if there was any damage. “You’re fine,” he said and gripped my window well. “Mrs. Hunter. Lo-la.” When he said my sister’s name musically, I looked back and saw she enjoyed this. Lola was big on boy flattery.

  Mom tried to start the van again, grinding the ignition too hard.

  “I don’t think that’s the way you’re supposed to do it,” Lola said.

  “Why don’t I save a parking spot for you, Mrs. Hunter?” Ajay said after her attempt failed. “I can use my grandfather’s sawhorses with a sign.”

  “That’s okay. We’re just running a couple of errands. Have a good night.”

  “You know,, this street gets pretty bad,” he pressed.

  “It’s Ms. Hunter, actually,” she said, not with a mean spirit, but it was awkward that she corrected him. “We’ll be fine. Thanks for the offer.”

  “If you change your mind, Ms. Hunter,” he said with a thoughtful look, “just give a call.”

  In a low voice he told me his number and that he was always up late.

  Mom was struggling to get the van into reverse. Otherwise I know she would have looked for a way to short-circuit our exchange, as if I were still in high school. Finally she maneuvered us into the street, which meant Ajay had to back up suddenly, though he managed to keep one hand on my door the whole time, even as he tripped a little walking into a pothole. Mom pulled forward, and he let go.

  “You’re not taking his number?” Mom said.

  “No worries,” I said. I had already punched it in.

  The first thing you see when you enter Evanston from Chicago, after curving around the lake and the cemetery on Sheridan heading north, is the other life. The lakeside apartments, the houses, the bigger houses, abundant trees, the estates where only certain people deserve to see the water up close, the beaches requiring tokens we couldn’t afford even if we used a fake address. There were, however, plenty of dogs that would be tagged and let loose on the shore the next summer.

  I was aware of these things and the fact that our world had become a constant adjustment to temperature extremes. The heat in the van cranked until we couldn’t take it, but turning it down meant turning it off, essentially. Opening the windows brought freezing drafts that hit Lola in the backseat, so we kept them shut.

  By the time we pulled into the drive-through, Lola was asleep, her head resting against the window. I noticed they had raised their prices but called the tiny ice-cream dish they threw in free.

  “You better get her a kids’ meal in case she wakes up,” I said.

  We pulled up to the speaker and Mom rolled down her window. She ignored the voice as she counted the small mountain of change she dug out of the glove compartment to see how much we could buy. She was on a new jag about not using the credit card, but I didn’t understand why she had waited until we were at the speaker to count change.

  “Thirteen, thirteen twenty-five, thirteen fifty …”

  “The guy’s waiting,” I said.

  “Damn it.” She looked in the rearview. There was one car behind us and another just pulling in.

  “Mom?”

  “Do you really think she’s going to eat anything tonight?” she asked. “Make that sweater in the back into a pillow for her head. What was that, fourteen something?”

  “Thirteen fifty,” I said as I unfastened my seatbelt and climbed into the back. I lifted Lo
la’s head away from the window to nestle the sweater in place. “I don’t want to be around if she doesn’t get her Big Kids’ Meal,” I said, returning to my seat.

  “I wasn’t suggesting we not get anything.”

  “She can take it for lunch tomorrow if she doesn’t eat it tonight.”

  “Cold chicken fingers? Cold fries?” Mom said loud enough to be heard over the sound of the engine.

  “Is that the six-piece or the ten-piece meal?” the voice answered from the scratchy speaker.

  We had both seen too many movies with this kind of gag moment, but we cracked up anyway.

  “I’ll get extra ketchup packets,” Mom said.

  “Make sure she gets the boy Avatar glass, not the girl.”

  Lola wasn’t able to fall back to sleep when we got home, so Mom warmed her meal up and washed and filled the new glass with fruit punch. As Lola turned the glass to study the pictures, I wondered about the world she was piecing together. She hadn’t seen the movie, probably wouldn’t for a long time. She gave us a dreamy look.

  It’s possible Mom was struck with the same helpless feeling I had in that moment, wondering how we would see that things turned out well for Lola.

  “Your sister said we had to get the one with the boy avatar,” Mom said and smiled at me.

  I went down to Cynthia’s a short while later to tell her I had seen Ajay and had no plans to call him.

  “You came downstairs to tell me you’re not going to call him?”

  That’s when she told me about this article she was reading. She had stop-sign-red hair that week, so everything she said had an emphasis, as if she were talking in high alert. “It says that some of us, no, most of us, have a story about one particular event in life that explains the things that happened before it and most of the things that happen after it.”

  When I quizzed her on this theory, she said this event is typically something terrible that happens in childhood.

  “People make this shit up all the time because it sells magazines,” I said.

  “So you have one of those stories,” she said.

  “The Brothers Grimm made things up, things that were terrible and sold some books. But I’m not sure …”

  “You’re afraid to say.”

  “I am not,” I said.

  “I’ll just listen, I promise,” she said.

  I waited as a train passed.

  “It’s a stupid idea,” I said.

  “No shortage of those,” she said, lighting one of those foul herbal things and blowing the smoke toward the hanging lamp over the table.

  “It makes me think of those surprise balls where the thing in the center is some junky little prize.”

  “Do you feel like you might unravel if you say? I have some vodka.”

  “Pass,” I said. She poured me a coffee and nudged the cup my way. I took a sip, burned my tongue, put the cup down, and said goodnight, going back upstairs.

  Outside our apartment I paused for a minute and studied Anna Lily’s door. I didn’t know if she had secured the lock on her door again or if I could simply grab the doorknob and enter. There was no peephole, but I didn’t know if she was inside—counting her cameras, labeling her boxes.

  I dropped off to the sound of water running in Nitro’s darkroom sink the next day and found myself at Niagara Falls with Ajay. We watched whole lakes fall over the edge of the earth, the last of the tour boats docked for the night, people shedding their blue rain ponchos.

  Slipping into a passage cut into the rock, we stood behind the falls by an opening where the pounding water sprayed us. Pressing his back against one of the blue walls, he drew me close, and we kissed in a lit-up state.

  “Hey, hey, you fell asleep,” Nitro said, shaking me.

  “No, I didn’t,” I said, unwilling to open my eyes. I wanted to be back in the dream.

  “You looked content.”

  “Then I don’t know why you woke me.”

  “You asked me to if you fell asleep.”

  I brought the loft into focus, his face. I was curled up on his couch.

  “Are you keeping something from me?” he said, as if I should get the context.

  I laughed. “You don’t? Keep things from me?”

  “Not anymore. So what film do you want to watch? Manhattan?”

  “You put that on last month, and I’m not sweet like Mariel.”

  “You hooking up with that guy in your building?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I think about you more than you realize. I … I’ll load a bowl while you think about a movie,” he said.

  Coughing and letting the smoke billow out, I said, “I do have a story to tell you.”

  “Ah, better than a movie. Don’t leave anything out.”

  Trying to gather my thoughts was like trying to take a photograph with a homemade box camera. There was only the one pinhole in the cardboard and the effort to keep my hands steady. “I’m sure I will, even if I don’t mean to,” I said.

  “I won’t be looking for the things you leave out,” he said.

  “I thought you were dating that photographer,” I said, looping back.

  “I told you, you’re ruining me from seeing anyone else.” He looked contrite, and I began.

  “On Sunday mornings my dad used to polish our convertible, and sometimes he drove out to Arlington Racetrack to play the horses. You like that start?”

  “That’s a good start,” he said.

  “My mother, who didn’t want to spend her Sundays betting on things to work out, never came along. Instead she built objects in our garage, sometimes with scrap metal and sometimes with clay and molds that became sculptures that filled our yard. And when we ran out of room they were crated up and driven over to friends’ yards. Each one a metal work with surfaces that mirrored the things around them.”

  “The good and the bad?” he asked, fiddling with the hookah.

  “I guess you could say that. I know she hoped he would never gamble too much or drink too much, and she believed if I were with him it would be a safe family outing, little more. She was pregnant at the time and eager to get as much work done as she could before the baby arrived. The thing was, I loved being with my father in those days, riding in his car, listening to his stories. I used to lean back and feel like the road was sailing right through me.”

  “I know the way that feels,” Nitro said.

  “I was nine when he asked me to come along and whispered that he had reserved a table in the Clubhouse. He said this would be a lucky day. “We won’t tell Mom,” he said and he cupped my chin in his hand the way he did sometimes and I heard his watch tick against my ear. Having a table in the Clubhouse was … what do they call it now, the Million Room?”

  “Not sure.”

  “Anyway, that table was an extravagance he said he had saved up for, just for us.”

  “Do you want another hit?”

  I shook my head. “‘We’ll take the back roads,’ he said and beamed at me in the rearview. Once we had gone a few blocks from the house, I asked if I could sit up front this time, and he pulled along the curb and I climbed over the seat. I was small for my age then, so the seatbelt was a little loose. But he folded his coat up and tucked it behind me until the belt was taut. That way I could keep my eyes on everything and we could talk.”

  “You always seem to know what you want.”

  “I asked how he and Mom had met. And he told me about working for his uncle who was a professional guesser, a carny.”

  “You’re wonderful,” Nitro said.

  “But you see I asked him this question a lot. I think my hope was that the story itself would make him fall in love with her in that same way again. For a while it had seemed that when we got home from wherever we were going all they did was fight. It almost didn’t matter over what. Grocery bills, needless art supplies or lawn equipment purchases. They met when they were so young. I hoped if things improved she wouldn’t bring up his shortcomings and he wo
uldn’t get on her about sculpting while Rome burns.

  “We parked in the big lot on the racetrack grounds, and when we were inside we stopped for a while to watch the horses walk around the paddock. That was my favorite part. I would be tall like my mother and father, but that year I wanted to remain my exact height and weight and become a jockey who wears red silks.”

  “You have to bring me a picture of you at that age,” Nitro said.

  “I don’t think so. Anyway, at the entrance to the Clubhouse my father slipped the hostess a folded bill, and she seated us by one of the giant windows. There we had a linen tablecloth and linen napkins and goblets of ice water and heavy knives and forks. ‘I guess your dad knows how to treat his girl,’ he said and leaned over and kissed my forehead. I wanted to say I was sorry Mom couldn’t come. But I had learned that there were certain conversations you could have before a race and others that were better left alone. I wasn’t always sure which was which, and I didn’t want to be the one who had jinxed him if he lost. So I sat quietly while he considered the Daily Racing Form and the other tip sheets. My father was a handsome man with a solid jaw, and his lips moved slightly when he read something significant. He liked to follow lineages, jockeys, and so on, and sometimes he shared some of this with me, but it never stuck.”

  “Sounds like he was successful.”

  “No, he always lost. I mean, if he had a formula, I’m not sure what it was—if he even knew. With each loss he ripped up his tickets and let the pieces drop to the carpet, and on this particular day he called the waiter over to our table and ordered another drink. That day he lost by straight bourbon.

  “‘And bring my girl a fresh Coke,’ he said as he loosened his tie. He didn’t want me to feel slighted in any way. Three Cokes had been delivered to me already. I could barely start on one before the next arrived. Soon the man with the carpet sweeper came along to nudge the last round of ripped tickets into his machine. The horses thundered past those giant windows, the boards lit up, the tickets were torn in two, and the drinks continued to arrive. By the seventh race my father looked red-eyed and confused. He put the last of his money on a serious long shot with a misshapen white star in her forelock. She was so jumpy it took three men to get her into the gate. The announcer said, as he always did—”