When We Disappear

by Lise Haines

  Lola covered her ears when Dad opened the bottle of cheap champagne. Roasted drumsticks with baby potatoes and sautéed carrots sat in the middle of the table on a platter. I stood at the opening to the kitchen, watching this scene. Mom made a point of telling him to pour a glass for me, and I made a point of saying I’d pass.

  “Sit down anyway,” Mom said.

  Lola pulled out the chair next to her, and I took a seat for her sake.

  “Go ahead. Tell them,” Mom said.

  He could barely contain himself. “I have some news, girls.”

  “What?” Lola said, looking worried.

  “Don’t make them wait,” Mom said.

  “I’ve been hired by a new insurance agency in downtown Chicago. I’ll be working full time starting Monday. It will take me a while to earn my commissions, but I … This is a very solid company with excellent backing. Your mother and I want to get us back to Evanston as soon as we can. And once we move,” he looked at me, “our big goal will be to get Mona settled in college.”

  “Stop,” I said.

  Dad ran his thumb over his upper teeth, studying me.

  “I understand, Mona,” Mom said, but she rested a hand on one of his hands instead of mine. I wasn’t sure if this was about getting him to slow down or if this was about affection. “Richard, why don’t you pass the chicken?”

  The tension in my father’s neck was evident.

  “I have a story,” Lola said. As Mom served the potatoes and Lola carefully dished up carrots, I noticed how long my sister’s hands had become, how graceful her fingers were, as she remained poised to tell her tale.

  “Yes?” I said.

  Lola made a sneaky face.

  “Go ahead, dear,” Mom said once the last plate was filled.

  Lola took a long time pushing her fork into her potatoes, watching us.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if you have a natural gift for storytelling, Lola,” Dad ventured.

  Lola took a drink of lemonade and put her glass down. I nudged her with my elbow. “We’re waiting, goose.”

  “What?” she said with that amused expression.

  “Tell us your story,” I said.

  Forks and knives came to a rest. My mother winked at me. Dad smiled to himself as he sipped his champagne.

  “This is it,” Lola said. “This is the story.”

  “You’re so postmodern, Lola,” I said.

  “What the heck?” she said.

  “Exactly.” Mom laughed. “What the heck.”

  “Did you get it?” Lola said. “We’re all in a story. Do I get to stay up and watch Beauty and the Beast? It’s on tonight.”

  “I checked the schedule,” Dad said. “It doesn’t start until eight.”

  Lola was always in bed by eight. We didn’t have a recording device on our TV and only five, sometimes six stations, and all of them knew how to fail.

  “Oh, I think just this once, since it’s not a school night. If we can turn the TV around so you can watch from my bed,” Mom said.

  “I love this table,” Lola said.

  For the last year or so she had had moments at meals where she would stop and look at Mom and me and say, I love everyone at this table. I think Mom understood as I did that her new arrangement of words was meant to somehow include our father, but not entirely. Then we all grew quiet and uncomfortable and even more uncomfortable in our own ways and ate the meal before us.

  Geary taught me there are times to slow down and wait for a shot. He said that all the rapid-fire cameras in the world couldn’t get that one image where truly seeing something and being ready, being available to the moment, could. When I considered my father’s face I knew I needed to wait.

  After dinner I took off for Nitro’s. He had just gotten a call from his ex and was upset because she had scheduled a ski trip when he was supposed to be in France to see their child. We killed a great many people on screen that night, and he gave me a T-shirt he knew I would like and a bag of chocolates from our favorite movie theater.

  I told him I couldn’t when he asked me to spend the weekend. I said he could use me, but that was about it. He said he had never used me and paced a lot after we had sex and smoked a cloud of cigarettes.

  The large uncovered windows woke me at first light, and I took off while he was still asleep. I left no note, only a print from the new batch of Lily’s negatives. My printing technique had improved, he’d comment on that next time, but I left it for the sadness in her work, the isolation, an intention that came out of her honesty—without chasing after it.

  I went home and got into my own bed, shifting into the sweet spot. Soon I fell into a state where I didn’t feel awake, but I didn’t feel asleep either. I found myself watching for Ajay.

  I guess that was the way. When things began to crack I took flight. Night after night I glided over Lake Michigan and followed a line of buoys and lighthouses. I tore between the tall buildings downtown as if I were a figure in a single-player game. I dreamed over the Mississippi, and I went out across the plains. There were lucid moments that started with a slow tug, an easy pull in the direction of flight, but other dreams yanked me upward as if a rope were tied around my waist. Sometimes I felt as if I were being hauled from drowning at the bottom of the world. Some people describe flight as a drunkenness, but I feel sharpness, like the view through a good lens.

  I entered a house. There was a woman, and she was pulling her favorite green sweater over her head. She fastened the button in the back and zipped her straight black skirt as I watched. She checked her hair and makeup in her dressing-table mirror before getting her heels on.

  Her husband called up the stairs to say he was moving the cars around so the station wagon would be at the end of the drive. “All gassed up and ready to go!” he said. The woman straightened her stockings and slipped into her heels. “Are the guys still coming over for the game?” the wife called.

  “Five out of six. Mac’s got to help his sister with something. He might be over later,” her husband said.

  “Can you put some apple juice in a sippy cup for our girl?” she asked.

  “You got it,” he said.

  A little girl ran into the big bedroom and flopped against the bed, throwing her hands over her head, facedown, waiting for her mother’s affection. Her mother kissed the back of her neck and checked to see if she’d used the potty. When they descended the stairs, one slow step at a time, the husband beamed up at his girls. “How can one man be so lucky?” he said.

  The woman stopped at the bottom landing and tilted her head slightly as if she were trying to remember something. She got to the bottom of the staircase and touched his face. While their little girl ran and got her small blanket for the ride, the wife said, “If anything goes wrong, if the car blows up, make sure to look for my wedding ring. It should be somewhere between the road and the woods. You’ll find a fragment of bone from my ring finger there. It’s always good to have something to bury, something to remember. The rest of me will be holding on to our little girl.”

  I guess my mother heard me scream and came running into my room.

  “I’m okay, I’m okay,” I said, gasping for air. “I’m okay.”

  “Poor love,” she said, rubbing my arms. “Do you know what you were dreaming?”

  “No, no. Did Lola … ?”

  “She’s fine. She didn’t wake up. Do you want a glass of water?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  When I heard her out in the kitchen, I became aware of the many times she had tried to lessen a pain she didn’t understand. I forget how many times we’d been at this place where she and I knew entirely different things.

  I heard them out in the living room. It was ten in the morning, and I had managed to fall back to sleep for a while. Mom said she was going to take Lola to her Saturday dance class. Dad volunteered to haul a particularly heavy piece of ironwork up from the basement out to the backyard. Mom directed him on some of the other pieces she wanted out there. Sh
e would decide where they would go as soon as she returned with Lola.

  “You don’t have to tiptoe when you come back upstairs, but do let Mona sleep in. She really needs to catch up,” Mom said. “And don’t forget to take your keys. I have the latches set to lock automatically.”

  “Next time I’ll come see you dance,” Dad said.

  “Only Mom and Mona get to see me dance,” Lola said.

  I could imagine his expression, the restrained acceptance, the effort not to look beaten down.

  “We’re going to be late. Let’s hustle,” Mom said.

  I waited until I heard them leave and my father go down the back stairs. I gave Mom extra time in case she and Lola had to rush back up for something they’d forgotten. Then I got up.

  I laughed aloud to find a copy of Siddhartha in my father’s pack. This wasn’t the kind of book he read, but it was completely dog-eared with underlined passages. Maybe he was studying to become the Buddha.

  There was a framed picture of Mom, Lola, and me that I didn’t remember. A box with his father’s cufflinks, one of them broken, was down toward the bottom. I had no idea why he dragged these things around. His kit bag had a few toiletries, the rest wedged into the bathroom. The receipt from his plane ticket to town was in a side pocket. I found the world’s most beat-up pair of shoes. A rain poncho in a separate compartment must have been forgotten from the way the polyurethane smelled. His world had become so emptied out I almost didn’t bother with the wallet again. It tumbled out as I was stuffing the rest of the things back in.

  I remember him letting me look in all the compartments of his wallet once. I had become curious about what a man hides in his back pocket. I felt the weight of this one in my hands. He never changed his wallet, even when Mom bought him a new one for Christmas one year. He said it was his lucky wallet. Inside, the picture of Mom was still there. I found six dollars, an almost expired Illinois license, and defunct AAA and medical insurance cards. The CPR card listed his blood type as A+. A tide chart and coupon for a bagel and coffee were from Atlantic City. He had a one-dollar raffle ticket. Though it was pretty frayed around the edges, he had wedged a photo of Lola as a newborn into a sleeve along with a picture of me from middle school on the other side. I made a point of returning each item to its exact location after examining it.

  Once I was done I remembered that some wallets have hidden money compartments. When I lifted the leather flap it was like pulling a bandage up from raw skin. Inside was a folded piece of newspaper. It broke in two and two again as I unfolded it. I decided to put the wallet back and take the article into my room in case he should finish what he was doing quickly and return upstairs.

  Closing my door, I braced my desk chair against the handle. I pulled my top sheet taut, making a smooth surface to reassemble the article. There was no headline, and it was only a portion of a story. Something about a hospital expansion.

  I felt ridiculous when I realized I was reading the wrong side.

  As I moved the bits around, I saw the headline:

  Northbrook Mother and Daughter in Fatal Hit-and-Run

  Their names, I finally learned, were Dorothy and Nan Kaminski. There was a picture of them with Mr. Kaminski, standing in a doorway to their house in Northbrook. They had been married six years, Nan their only child. Their picture formed a bright display in my mind as if electrical current came off the fragile paper. Dorothy and Nan looked like the people in my dreams. But then I had seen them once, struggling in their car.

  My hands shook as I read. Dorothy Kaminski, a part-time nurse active in her community, was a 26-year-old wife and mother. Her daughter, Nan, had just turned three. They were both killed in a hit-and-run late Sunday evening. Their car was struck at approximately 6:15 p.m. as they returned toward home from a shopping trip. Police estimate the driver of the other car was going 35 to 40 miles per hour when the perpetrator swerved and crossed over into the other lane. The victims’ car exploded within minutes. The Kaminskis were unable to get out of the car in time. Police are looking for any witnesses who might have seen this car by the side of the road or the vehicle that struck it. Detectives are combing the area for evidence. Anyone with information is asked to call the police.

  I think I had always known.

  When I had calmed down enough I looked at the date on the article. I teased out the small box I kept inside the toe of one boot in my closet, unfolding the papers inside. Even before I looked I knew I would find the same date printed out along with the time and the name of the garage in the Quonset hut. On another slip of paper were the make and model of our old car with the license-plate number. All in a nine-year-old’s handwriting. I used to keep them in a locket, but I had emptied the locket out when I gave it to Lola.

  I was trembling when I went out to the living room and stuffed the pieces of the article back into his wallet. I washed my face and brushed my hair. My mind began to flood.

  Cynthia once told me about a man in China who went on the weekends to save suicide jumpers at the Nanjing Bridge. People propelled to take flight when the ground beneath them burned away. It’s the longest bridge in the world, so sometimes he couldn’t get to them fast enough, though he ran hard. Or he found himself barely holding on to one of them by an ankle or an arm. He was a strong man, but he wasn’t always strong enough. She told me he’d saved over 150 people, and he knew they would continue to drop. He had a regular job too, far away from the bridge, so there was nothing he could do on the weekdays.

  I wished I could have saved them all.

  Richard

  There was a night when I was sixteen and Sor drove us through Gary, Indiana, on the way to the next carnival. I held my nose, the stench coming off the factory smokestacks. The sky was yellow, my throat burned, and there was a bitter taste in my mouth. When I asked Sor again to roll up his window he straightened his arms, sitting as far back from the steering wheel as possible, and said, “A sheet of glass won’t do you any good in this stink, but you can have a drop of whiskey if you sit up like a man and stop fussing.”

  A half case of Wild Turkey was settled into the back footwell from our stopover in Kentucky. I pulled back the blanket that covered the box and helped myself to a bottle. Sor took the first draw. Before long I felt the rotten sky pass through me like a breeze, and Uncle Sor began to sermonize about what it is to be a man under those smokestacks that he referred to as the Gods of Industry. His spouting didn’t always add up, at least it didn’t at the time, but I listened intently.

  “We’re always in the middle of one kind of destruction or another,” he said. “Life is never at rest. That’s a fact. So if you find the kind of work you love and the right woman, well, I hope someone has taught you the word transcendence by now—so you can appreciate it when it comes your way.”

  I don’t know what it was exactly, maybe the bourbon, maybe the freedom of being away from home, but I put my head out the window and hollered into the wind. He laughed and took another drink and said that mostly I shouldn’t listen to anything he had to say but that on this particular score he knew what he was talking about, and I should probably keep my head in the car.

  When I came home from burying that guy, and Liz helped me get my suit altered, I rode the elevated train down to the lunch meeting in a sweat and sat at a table with six people, some eager to see if I was the right fit but at least one trying to trip me up. I landed the job despite that and after everything that had come before it, every last bitter thing. Then I knew exactly what Sor had meant. I was that kid again, passing through the stench of things not working right, and suddenly I could put my head out the window and gulp air and holler my lungs out and drive without stopping.

  Liz was working on her first sculpture in two years, and few things could have made me happier. When she asked me to help her haul some of the heavier metal pieces up from the basement before taking Lola to her Saturday dance class, I felt like a man finally sitting down to the table again. I had a job that could, with any luck, see us
through to retirement. And even though we weren’t thirty anymore and there was Mona’s schooling to take care of and we had to work our way back into Evanston, I planned to keep my head down and put in those long hours on a steady basis. Liz was tired of telling Lola that she should walk softly because of the people below, and that would change too. I thought, little by little, Lola was starting to warm up to me. And even with Mona, I don’t know that you can forget all the good things a parent has worked to put in place. At least I hoped she wouldn’t.

  I kept the radio and television off so Mona could catch up on her sleep. I know how a lack of sleep builds and builds, and I told Liz this had to be affecting Mona’s spirits. Liz just looked at me and said, “I’m sure you can imagine a world of things that affect Mona’s spirits.” These were the places where we strained. But the more I thought about it, I was certain Mona couldn’t be herself or even know how to address things if she wasn’t getting a good night’s sleep.

  I heard her bedroom door click open and the shower go on. Mona liked a good long shower and never skimped on time in front of the mirror, so I put on a television talk show in the living room to keep me company. A woman in Toledo had, in all likelihood, killed her husband fifteen years ago but wouldn’t admit it. The host was trying to get her to take a lie-detector test on air. I always wondered how they convinced these people to bludgeon themselves on television.

  I opened a package of Oreos and poured a cup of coffee and settled in. Mona came into the living room.

  “I was wondering when you’d be up,” I said.

  Without looking my way she began to rummage in the hall closet.

  “You shooting pictures today?”

  She turned around but instead of facing me went over to the windows and looked down to the street.

  “Mom said she planned to watch Lola dance for a while and then run some errands. I’d give them about forty-five minutes,” I said.

  Just then the woman from Toledo laughed. “Why the hell should I subject myself to your bleep scrutiny?”