When We Disappear

by Lise Haines

  “Sorry,” he said, shaking his head as if he was coming out of a fog. “Sorry. How long?”

  “I thought you knew. Six months or seven. Mom said something about you being in Florida. Maybe you could send tickets so I could bring Lola down this summer when we have some time. Are you north or south of Universal Studios?” I asked.

  “I don’t live in Florida, Mona. I’ve come home,” he said.

  When I first started driving my mother went over a list of things that could go wrong so I would know how to handle those situations. The engine might overheat or a tire could pick up a nail or a hunk of glass and someone with sinister intent might pull over and offer to help. But we never discussed the idea of arriving at an unmarked split in the road, out in the middle of nowhere, without a guidance system or map.

  He pressed his fingertips to his eyelids and I saw the edge of the cut, the rest covered by a bandage. This looked like the beginning of a line of stitches.

  Maybe he hoped when he opened his eyes again he’d be in another world where I would be dark-haired, small like a jockey, and openhearted. I put the camera strap around my neck and tucked it into my jacket to give it the best chance of staying dry. I zipped up and put on my gloves, trying to picture how things might have gone differently. I couldn’t come up with anything.

  When I looked up I saw my father as if he were sitting in the middle of a frozen lake, the ice starting to crack beneath him. I began to wonder about the prints I would get from the camera that turned everything upside down when it opened up.

  Pushing my way out of the booth, I hurried to get away. As I opened the door to the restaurant I heard him call my name and then a loud commotion. A chair hit the ground, dishes clattered. I turned back and saw that he had tripped over his pack and was splayed on the floor.

  I ran for blocks, sometimes skidding in the snow. Avoiding the L, where I thought he might appear, I stuck to side streets. The difficult part was keeping the camera steady under my coat. When I came to an abrupt stop to avoid an ice puddle, I felt the Hasselblad hit my ribs as if it might knock one out.

  I knew I had reached the lake in the sheeting snow when I found the summer snack bar. Behind me a waste of giant homes I couldn’t see but recognized. I got under the eaves and took my phone out. I tried to get in touch with Cynthia, but she didn’t answer, then Briana, who had been a good friend in high school and intermittently streamed things to my phone. But she was going to school in Canada and had her own snow to deal with. I tried a couple of other friends, but no one was anywhere near my part of town.

  More than a mile from the L, from a bus, three or four miles from the apartment, and my feet and hands were ice and bone. Everything was soaked through or half frozen except my jacket, that large all-weather endurance jacket I now thanked my mother for buying for me three winters earlier, though I hadn’t much liked it at the time.

  It occurred to me that Ajay seemed like a guy who could locate a car in a pinch. He picked up, and his voice dipped in and out of reception, but when he got what I was saying he told me he’d hurry. I paced by the snack bar, up and back along the walk covered by an overhang. I could almost make out the lake through the flurries and thought about the times I had come here with my family in the summers. Everyone suited up, the towels and lotion, umbrellas and cold drinks, weight distributed so that my father would carry the heaviest load.

  The snow had eased by the time Ajay arrived, the world thick with plows and salt trucks. He drove under the speed limit, babying an old Impala.

  “It’s possible the vacuum pump might go,” he said, locking on to me as he drove.

  “What?”

  “That noise,” he said over the noise, his eyes still fixed on me.

  “Don’t do that,” I said as I put my boots up, moving them near the heating vents.

  “Don’t do what?” he asked.

  “You know in movies where the driver looks away to have a conversation, and five minutes later you wonder if he’s ever going to look at the road again.”

  “Someone should do a montage of that.” He laughed. “Starting to warm up?”

  “Ask me in a week. Where are we going?”

  We had just passed the turn to our street.

  “The Sears Tower.” He reached over, pulled my visor down, and popped open the mirror. I had mascara streaked to my chin. Using the snow caked on my scarf, I cleaned my face.

  “No, seriously,” I said.

  “A guy I work with gave me passes.” He pulled them from a jacket pocket and handed them to me.

  I thought about insisting we go home, but I knew my mother would occupy herself with trying to read my face. “Why not?” I said.

  I sent a message to her that I was taking the L downtown to do snow pictures so she wouldn’t stress. I rarely checked in, but I could imagine her watching the sidewalk, fearful about the storm. Turning off my phone, I sank into the front seat, and before long we were passing the Lincoln Park Zoo on one side of the Drive, the lake on the other. Pointing out a stand of trees by a breakwater, I said, “I hung out with a friend in late August when the waves were insane. She stretched out under the trees, and I used a waterproof camera.”

  “You’ll have to show me,” he said. I didn’t know if he meant the place or the pictures. Even though he drove with care we did some sliding. Shortly after the Mies van der Rohe buildings—he seemed pleased that I knew about them—we turned inland to see the winter lights on Michigan Avenue. We drove past the Tribune Tower and across the river.

  “I never see you with friends,” he said.

  “And you have so many,” I said.

  “You’ve been watching me.” He looked pleased.

  “Cynthia fills me in on all the neighbors.”

  “Ah, Cynthia from the second floor.”

  We listened to the sound of the vacuum pump.

  “A lot of my friends have taken off,” I said. “Cynthia keeps inviting me to her friends’ parties, but they smoke like mad and talk about … well, one time this girl cornered me and talked about light-bulb wattage and compact fluorescent bulbs, and finally she hit on grow lights. Someone else picked up on this and said he was going to start a communal beet farm and did I know anything about manure. And I don’t know how many people handed me mai tais, and I don’t drink mai tais, and after the first one I kept dumping them over the balcony. I mean, I love Cynthia, but you know.”

  I was pretty wound up. He just let me talk.

  We found a parking spot and walked over to the tower. With no one else waiting in line, we ducked under ropes and got on the elevator with a couple of vacationers, probably in their fifties.

  Although my ears began to seal over from the quick altitude shift, I heard a recorded voice blast from the speakers: Upon completion in 1974, the Willis Tower, first known as the Sears Tower, was the tallest building in the world.

  “Ha. Taller than the World Trade Center towers.” The man laughed.

  “Did he just say that?” I asked, maybe on the loud side. But who could tell with the pressure on the eardrums and the grating, cheerful music leaking around the voice? The man pointed his guidebook at me and said, “That’s not necessary.”

  “You don’t think making a joke about the World Trade Center is in bad taste?” Ajay said.

  “The world’s in bad taste,” the man said. “Get used to it.”

  Ajay, who was on the other side of me, began to push toward him, and I pushed back, saying, “The guy’s a jerk.”

  Now the woman looked worried and yanked on her husband’s sleeve.

  He said, “I told you we should have gone to Atlanta.”

  Ajay and I laughed and blew them off, the doors opened, and we walked out into the large open space surrounded by windows on all sides. We went past the informational displays and the photo booth, straight to the east-facing windows, where we stood for a long time, looking out at the ice ripples.

  We became transfixed. I remembered a story I once read, “The Falling Girl
.” I felt, in that moment, that I could be her, or my version of her. So that when Cynthia would knock at the door looking for me, my mother would say, I think she’s out falling. Or if a census worker came by, Lola would say, I’ll tell her you stopped by when she reaches our floor. And when my father would appear in another alley, I would look down at him and see that I still had some altitude left and call out, I’ve heard the collision over and over in my sleep. Sometimes the car explodes. I see hands and teeth and eyes and bits of bone fall through the air. If I can catch all of those pieces, I’ll ship them to you. Be sure to send your address.

  “You okay?” Ajay said, pulling me back in.

  “Sure. Great views.”

  As we moved along the windows he pointed out some of the sites. I heard him mention Al Capone’s headquarters and something about the Field Museum. “Sorry. Architecture school,” he said. “Stop me if I get carried away.”

  I kept wondering what Richard would do now that he was back. What I would do.

  Ajay took me lightly by the shoulders and coaxed me to turn until I faced him. “I’m a good listener.”

  Cynthia once told me that it’s fairly common for people to tell strangers things they won’t tell their family or friends. And maybe that’s why I told this guy who lived on the first floor of my apartment building that I was probably the only one who witnessed something my father had done, something for which he could go to prison.

  “So what are you going to do?” Ajay asked.

  “Exactly,” I said.

  We slogged through the snow and got back in the car, but it wouldn’t start. Hot-wiring didn’t work. We went into a store, where he made a couple of calls, and eventually a tow service came and pulled the Impala away through the slush. Ajay said he and his friend might get it to run for another month before the next repair. It was that kind of car.

  Soon enough we were standing in an L car heading home. Holding on to a pole together, we watched the woman seated by us, the way she tucked into herself. We made a great effort to avoid knocking against her thin legs or pressing against her birdlike feet despite the people pushing against us. She folded and refolded her newspaper as well as herself in an effort to be undisturbed, and when she got absorbed in her paper I glanced at an article about a woman in Ohio. I had heard about her on the news. She had been arrested for falsifying documents about where she and her kids lived so she could get them into a decent school district. This woman was about to graduate from the University of Akron with a degree in education. She was working with special needs kids when they hauled her off to jail. I turned away, feeling my ribs ache.

  So I could baby the camera, Ajay had insisted on taking my pack.

  I asked about his parents.

  “My father was a rather brilliant structural engineer, living in India, when he was offered a job with one of the best firms in Chicago. My mother was a translator, and she planned to look for work here too, though she didn’t share his enthusiasm for America. My father wanted her to stay home at least part time and hoped for a large family. They brought my grandfather along because he was a widower and my father was his only child. I was to go to Harvard one day or MIT. This was determined when I was six months old.”

  “No expectations.”

  “Right? My mother was serious about most things and quite elegant. My father was a generally happy man, into all things Western. He loved Western suits and shoes and hamburgers and fries.”

  “I had a dream about your parents.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I can’t remember most of it,” I said.

  He laughed. “Go on.”

  “I was in your apartment. There was a picture of a man and woman in a small frame—at least I thought they were your parents—she was tall and beautiful and wore a dark-green sari with silver edging, and he was short but stood very straight. He wore a cream-colored linen suit. There was more to the dream, but that’s all I remember.”

  “That’s them. That’s how my parents are dressed in a small photo in the dining room.”

  “Now I’m spooked,” I said.

  “That makes two of us,” Ajay said.

  One time Geary and I were looking at images by Ralph Meatyard—the photographer known for putting children in scary dime-store masks for some of his shots—and Geary had talked about the line between the mystical and madness. And that’s how it felt, this strange kind of knowing I had with Ajay. But since I didn’t believe in mystical things, I wondered where this left me. I had an aunt who went mad. My father told me she wanted to save all the dogs in the world, believing that her two-bedroom home in Michigan was the center of a dog universe that she was responsible for. She kept more than seventy dogs, a number that she stole outside grocery stores and restaurants where their owners had tied them up. She fed them, bathed them, and outfitted them in suits and skirts and bonnets. Each dog had a bed frame and mattress with a full set of linen and towels. She had a village of dogs, a town full of her own madness.

  A sudden movement of the train wedged me against Ajay. I righted myself when the woman next to us squeaked loudly. The train completed the turn.

  “Keep going—about your parents.”

  “My father loved American television. I mean the absolute worst that sitcoms had to offer. And he was a great punster. My mother was a wonderful cook. When we first got here from India they were eager to move out of the hotel so my mother would have a kitchen again. They set out to look for a new home in the burbs. I was four, and they decided to leave me at the hotel with my grandfather so they could move quickly through a string of open houses. My grandfather had to hold me back to keep me from running after them, just on that day, he said, no other. I cried and cried when they left, and he had no idea why. I don’t know if my father was the best driver, but he was still learning the American rules of the road and it was raining out. A truck hit them head-on. My family came from India. Too many of the roads, especially the ones in the villages, have no signs at all.”

  I moved my hands so they covered one of his as if to anchor him and the train we traveled in.

  “I barely remember them now. I don’t even remember getting the bad news. My grandfather talks about them regularly, though, and he likes to remind me that we lived in a beautiful, large home in India with a big staff. But between two governments, four attorneys, and five banks we lost everything. My grandfather was a retired mathematics professor. After my parents died he needed to go back to work to support us. He couldn’t find any work in his field here and thought about returning to India. But his father had been a welder, and my grandfather had helped his father out when he was young, so he knew how to weld. Hoping he might get enough work to keep us going, he bought some basic equipment to start out and let some of the people in the Indian community here know he was available. They all knew about the accident. Someone hired him right away for a project. Pretty soon he was busy and managed in time to get a work permit. He got dual citizenship, set up his own business with a partner and made a go of it. I owe the old man a great deal, you see.”

  The train rocked into Edgewater station, slowly clicking past moneylenders, donut places, locksmiths. People shuffled in and out of doors.

  “Go out with me,” he said. “There’s a restaurant I want to take you to.”

  “Not the best timing,” I said.

  “Then let me kiss you so I can work on my timing.”

  The woman next to us gave me this look as if to say, Please get it over with.

  “Why were you on the tracks the other night?” I asked.

  “I was waiting for a train, and then I saw you at your window. I used to go out on the rails all the time with a friend when I was younger. Thankfully my grandfather never found out. I just kept inching over that way. And then you waved, and I heard the train and jumped.”

  “I’m seeing someone,” I said.

  “I guess I do need to work on my timing.”

  I took hold of his jacket then. “Sorry. Mixed signals,”
I said and pulled him toward me, just a little, and kissed him a great deal.

  “I don’t mind,” he said finally and kissed me back.

  Mom dropped in at work as I was cleaning up to go. We picked Lola up from aftercare, and she showed us the new painting she had done of Dad. He was standing under an orange tree. The oranges were the size of small planets, and they didn’t seem to be attached to branches, as if they were all about to drop on his head.

  He hadn’t shown at our apartment yet, and I began to think he was on his way back to Florida.

  We drove to the A&P, where they were promoting a chance to win a vacation in the tropics. Cardboard pineapples strung across the ceiling danced in the breeze from the overhead vents.

  Lining up a cart, Mom said, “I have two hundred dollars, and my goal is to buy enough for three weeks. I have a list.”

  Our groceries averaged a hundred twenty-five dollars a week or more, and we always ended up going back to the store for milk and bread and eggs.

  “Huh,” I said.

  “Huh,” Lola mimicked. She didn’t have a clear sense of time despite drawing hands on analog clocks on her school worksheets. Now her face expressed too much concern for a five-year-old.

  “Let’s start with household items, paper products, and so on,” Mom said. She opened the calculator on her phone. “We’re looking for generic products.”

  “Generic toilet paper?” I said.

  Lola’s jaw dropped, and she took a few steps back, drawing too close to a stack of cracker boxes.

  “Your sister is fooling around,” Mom said and pulled her away.

  By the time we got to the deli section at the far end of the store, we had $224.23 in items before our frequent-shopper discount, coupons, and sales tax.

  “I get a cupcake,” Lola said firmly.

  “I’ll put the bleach back, the shampoo …” Mom said, starting to reach into the cart.

  “We’re out of shampoo.” I said this lightly so she wouldn’t get too concerned.