When We Disappear

by Lise Haines

  “On the weekends I can go down to the library and work, or into the office. Before long we’ll be saving up money for her tuition—instead of seeing it go to two apartments. I really think we can make this work.”

  I could hear the refrigerator noises, everything else quiet.

  “I’m a good man, Liz.”

  “Why would you say that? Of course you are.”

  “I mean, we all make mistakes, but you have to look at the whole person, and you have to admit …” And then I wasn’t sure where I was going, and I began searching for something that would leave our conversation on an upbeat note. Just then the phone rang. It was Alice’s mother. She was inviting Lola to stay over for dinner, and if that was okay, Liz could pick her up after dessert or stop in and join them. Depending on how Lola was doing, this seemed to leave another large window of time for us to spend together.

  But Liz bundled up, asked me to think about things, and went back downstairs to weld.

  When Liz took off to get Lola I went down to see the new work up close again. We would have that to talk about at least. The lights to the back stairs were out, but I made my way with the flashlight charging by the door. Downstairs, I beamed the light on her work. Liz had a way of keeping a vision going, no matter what life threw at her. I just had to convince her I was still part of that vision.

  Even standing there, it was impossible not to think about Mr. Kaminski again. I began to wonder if he lived in the area still. I imagined he would be remarried by now and have a couple of little kids. They would probably be wrapped around his legs if I rang the bell and he came to the door.

  He would look at me and ask if I was working for one of those environmental organizations. I’d see that he was staring at my chest, and realize I wore a T-shirt Liz gave me from an environmental group after making a donation. I would stumble worse than expected, saying something crazy or just Sorry, I forgot my clipboard; I’ll come back another time. But maybe I’d find a way to look him in the eyes. If I apologized … if there really was something I could do … But I guessed that was thinking without oxygen.

  When I heard someone on the back stairs, I realized Mona’s bedroom light was on. I shone the flashlight upward, and there she was, carrying the garbage that I had tied off and meant to bring down with me. Liz had told me if we didn’t make this effort nightly, the rats would be back, though she called them mice.

  “Can you see okay?” I called.

  “Not when you take the only flashlight in the apartment,” Mona said.

  “Sorry, dear.”

  I kept the light steady as she made her way to the bottom. On the last couple of steps she said, “Don’t call me dear.”

  “Did your fever break?”

  Again she iced me out, starting around the side of the building to toss the garbage into the dumpster.

  “What happened to your hand?”

  “Nothing,” she said and dropped the heavy metal lid. “A minor darkroom thing.”

  “You sure?”

  She said nothing, so I thought it best to proceed. “I realized after we talked,” I began, “that all any of us ever really wants …” The flashlight started to sputter, and I lost my train of thought.

  “What?” she said and then more quietly, in the way that Liz gets sometimes when she has come to the end of her patience, “What do we all want?”

  I felt like I was speeding through a tunnel of my own making, and the only thing I could hear was this shushing noise. The bulb on the flashlight fluttered again and went out. Pain traveled around my head, and I leaned against the rail.

  “To get things right,” I said.

  She pulled the flashlight out of my hands and beat it against her leg too hard, and a faint glow appeared. “Then that’s what you should do,” she said.

  She handed the flashlight back to me and told me to go first. So I did, and then I stood inside the door to the kitchen and listened until I heard her steps, worried that something might happen to her down there in the dark before Liz got home.

  Mona

  Evanston merchants had their shovels out the next morning as I slogged along in heavy boots, trying to wrap my mind around my life. If my mother had been with us that day I like to imagine she would have done everything in her power to save the Kaminskis, that her pregnancy would have made her fierce.

  When I got to the studio Geary asked, “What happened to your hand?”

  “Minor kitchen thing. I’m fine.”

  Before I had my jacket off he opened a book to a print of Marilyn Monroe by Milton Greene. “What do you see?” he asked. This was a ritual of ours, to start our day studying one image before we set to work. I began with the tangible, concrete facts.

  “Marilyn sitting in a palm reader’s window wearing a flared skirt, a Bohemian blouse dropped at one shoulder, plenty of necklaces and bracelets. A city street reflected in the windowpane.”

  “That street is on a 20th Century lot, and she raided the costume department for this shoot,” he said.

  “The way her palm is pressed against the glass, not far from the palm painted on the window, is overdone,” I said. “And the light is harsh.”

  “The way Hollywood was to her, right? Maybe there were times when she wanted someone to stop and read who she really was?” Geary shrugged.

  “So is this Milton’s or Marilyn’s obsession?” I asked.

  “She seemed as engaged with the camera as her photographers,” he said.

  “There’s one taken somewhere in Illinois in the 1950s where she’s lying on a bed asleep with one arm up. Plain white pillow and sheets. I like that one.”

  “Different book,” he said. “Eve Arnold. Hold on.” He went upstairs, and soon he was back and showed me the exact image.

  “So what is it about this one that does it for you?” he asked.

  “The light. The way the black edges hold her … secure. And the bedding illuminates her. Her humanness. The awkward reality of her arm and the fact that it’s half covering her face so you don’t feel like you’re intruding. You can look at her without limit, without embarrassment. The hand on her belly might be about vulnerability. The dress makes me think of a series of hair ribbons woven together. More than anything I love that Arnold caught her at rest. Not performing, not used, not crushed, not over the top, just still.”

  He snapped the book shut. “Are you printing your own work today?” he asked.

  “If you think there’s time.”

  “We have some things to get out, but I think we’ll be okay.”

  He had already printed the contact sheets on the job from the day before, and he handed me those along with a marking pen. When we had time he gave me first crack, and then he agreed or disagreed and told me why. Sometimes he went along with one of my choices just to illustrate what I hadn’t seen with the loupe—the small magnifying glass I held over the images against the light box.

  I circled one or another. “Have you ever worried if you did something you felt was right, someone you love might suffer as a result?”

  “Well, my family would have had a more comfortable life if I had been an attorney. But here I am.” He laughed.

  “No, I mean …”

  “Seriously? I would say … I was arrested during marches. Beaten with a billy club once. And that scared my mother half to death. She was a widow and I was her only child.”

  My pen froze over the contact sheets. I had seen footage of Selma. I had seen the dogs, the fire hoses. “In the South?”

  “Right here in Chicago.”

  “Did you take any photos?”

  He said he’d dig them out but not today. “To put this in scale, Reverend King and Malcolm X had their houses firebombed with their families inside.”

  “I should let you mark the contacts today,” I said, handing him the loupe.

  Geary sometimes talked about the way speed is used in photography, which can be very different than motion. There’s the speed at which we take in an image, how the eye move
s from one point in the frame to another when we view a print. And there’s the speed of the film, and that’s something altogether different, though it’s significant in the way it captures or seems not to capture motion. As I looked at the upper windows, branches moved by the wind, it was as if I were seeing something in time lapse. The trouble was I couldn’t change my own speed to get in sync with them. I stood perfectly still as light and shadow streamed across the walls of the studio and the tears fell down my face and soaked my T-shirt.

  “Now, here’s a fact you don’t know,” he said, putting an arm around my shoulders. “My mother wanted me to be a Baptist preacher. So just for today, you and I could pretend I met that petition and that I’ve been sworn to a higher secrecy if you want to tell me what’s going on.” He let me go and pulled a couple of the prop chairs together and asked me to take a seat.

  And so Geary became the second person I told the story of the hit-and-run to. I made this version considerably shorter than the whole coiled-up tale, stopping only when Lettie came downstairs to say she was off to see a friend. She refrained from asking me if I was okay but nodded as if to say she knew Geary would sort things out. We were behind schedule now, but he didn’t seem troubled by this. Geary reached out and took one of my hands.

  Then he let my hand go as if he were reeling out a line instead of cutting me free. Sitting back, he said, “Honestly, I don’t know what I’d do. It’s one thing for your father to pay for the consequences of his actions, but it’s another thing altogether to see something go wrong for your mother and Lola and you as a result. You just don’t know who might pick your father’s story up on the news.”

  He suggested I give this more thought. He would too.

  I stayed until I had developed and printed some of the Hasselblad film, and I made two or three more Lily prints. As I stood over the trays watching Lily’s neighborhood children come to life, I found something I had never seen before. Lily didn’t chase statements or moods. Maybe this came from an understanding that the world is overloaded with pitches and messages, or maybe it was simply her eye. But she allowed her captives to be flawed and temporal. She took what was there without finding an angle to interpret them or make them noble or worthy of pity. They were bald as winter trees.

  When Lily’s prints were dry I tucked them away.

  I found Geary making out bills in his office. When I surfaced he asked to see my Hasselblad prints, and soon we had them laid out on a table.

  “There it is,” he said, singling out four shots he kept arranging until he found the best sequence. All of them were taken of my father the day he returned to town.

  “You can see the regret,” he said. “It’s as if he was a powerful man once, or at least thought of himself that way.”

  We were both silent, listening to the print dryer ticking as it cooled.

  “Nice,” Geary said, folding his arms over his chest.

  This was his highest praise, that single word, nice.

  “I won’t know where I stand unless you hit me between the eyes. I have times when I think I need to do something … more practical, you know?”

  “I believe you’ve heard me tell students they’re starting to get a sense of composition because until that moment they hadn’t understood composition at all and it’s finally emerging in their work. Before that, maybe I told them their sense of balance or their affinity with their subjects was progressing because that’s all they had and they needed to hold on to something to feel inspired. I’m telling you, you have competition-level photographs, and you have one week left to get them there.”

  “I don’t know if this is the time,” I said.

  “I’ll print out the blank application on Monday and go over it with you. Use these four shots. Nothing else. No essay, just a letter of recommendation from me. I’ll get on it tonight. Smart to show the black edge of the negatives, mirroring the exposed man, even if Avedon already did it. Look, if I have to fill it out and send it in myself, I will. Meanwhile, you push through whatever it is that has you thinking the time isn’t right.”

  “Thank you. You’re…”

  “Just leave the prints in my office.”

  I was happy not to carry my father around all day any more than I already had to.

  A couple of guys in our park grumbled something at me, but they looked too wasted to do anything but cling to the fence, smoke, and hack their lungs up. One man wavered back and forth with a bottle wrapped in a brown bag and sang.

  As I walked through the neighborhood I ran through the Marvels again. If the owner asked about my favorites, Cynthia said Silver Surfer or Storm were safe bets. But did her boss really want safe? I had crammed half the night so I could recall some of the better manga and name a few of the Italian as well. I couldn’t call up more than two Alternative titles despite Cynthia quizzing me for a while, and I was totally weak on the Franco-Belgians. “Franco-Belgians?” I had said. She probably knew five hundred plus comic book series in all. If I got stuck, she told me to make something up. “Be the comic book,” she said. “By the time he figures it out, you’ll be hired.”

  Past the park now, I became aware of a noise like a pneumatic drill or machine-gun rounds firing off. I ducked as I turned. Constantina was moving my way at a fast clip, her high-heeled boots drumming on the pavement around patches of ice. I started to cross the street away from her when she called out, waving frantically. One of her ankles buckled, but she didn’t let this stop her. I noticed that her hair, tightly bound in a ponytail, had an overload of bobby pins around the contours of her skull, as if she were trying to keep something in her head from slipping away.

  “I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” she said.

  “You’ve been looking for me? Why not just watch the Auto-Tuned version? I have to get somewhere.”

  “I’ll walk with you.”

  “No.”

  “So what did he say about my picture?”

  I checked my watch. I was two blocks from an interview that was starting in five minutes. Despite my best efforts to pull away, I couldn’t rest in my own body anymore and began to travel into hers. I felt the tightness in her chest and how cold it was when the air picked up and went through her jacket. Her stomach felt sour; the button at the top of her jeans dug into her flesh. I felt the pinch and ache of her feet in those tall boots, all the toes cramped from the fit, numb from the cold.

  “I haven’t really seen him,” I said as I snapped out of being Constantina.

  “Hold this,” she said and handed me her purse.

  “Not today. I really have to go,” I said.

  “I’ll be super quick,” she said, and handed me her jacket. Then she pulled off a boot, and a tube of model-airplane glue hit the sidewalk. She picked the tube up and placed it between her teeth, shifting about, trying to keep her bare foot from touching the icy pavement. The bottoms of her jeans were so tight they wouldn’t yield, and I thought she was going to tip over. She wavered and put the boot on top of the pile I was holding and added the second boot.

  Suddenly she unzipped her jeans.

  “You don’t want to do that,” I said.

  Ignoring me, she began to push them down her legs. That would have been the moment to run. But I was stopped somewhere between paralysis, fascination, and concern. As she stood on the bunched-up jeans, I saw that Ajay was written on one leg in a florid script near a cascade of marks. She must have used a razor blade to make dozens of ‘A’s up and down the insides of her thighs. “You’ll never love him the way I do,” she said around the tube.

  Things spilled from my arms now, and I hurried to pick them back up. As I glanced around I wondered who was watching the woman stripped bare for love. The guys down at the park were too far away, but I could see neighbors looking from apartment windows. They didn’t bother to peer through the cracks of blinds but stood boldly, in full view.

  This wasn’t an area where you had to worry too much about people calling the authorities. Nobody wanted to be
known as someone who had called the cops, though sometimes people turned out for the battles that spilled into the streets and left someone unconscious or dead.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, not sure what else I could say.

  The paint wrapping the glue tube started to flake, and some of that clung to her lips. I stood there as she began to pull her sweater over her head. I saw the tat of a small broken heart in blue and purple with a sword through it near her thin bra.

  “Please stop,” I said.

  Constantina let her sweater drop back around her shoulders, took the tube out of her mouth, and said, “I’m going to stand out here all day and night without any clothes on until you find him and bring him here.”

  The wind picked up over the lake and pushed through the corridors and alleyways until it found us. She stood in the bitter air, waiting. Her scars reddened.

  “I’ll call him,” I said, digging out my phone. She put her arms back in her sleeves.

  “That’s so interesting,” she said. “You have the phone number of a guy you barely know and never really see.”

  When he picked up I talked fast, finally saying, “She’s promised to get dressed if you hurry.” Then I hung up. This seemed to satisfy her, and she struggled a little in the cold but was finally dressed again. As I handed her the boots I felt like a wardrobe person working on a B movie I didn’t understand. Constantina wiped away the dark show of eyeliner, and I saw a newness to her as Ajay sprinted into view.

  He mouthed something to me that I tried to decipher. Constantina made a careful study of this transaction and said, “I don’t get it. What’s so special about this?”

  I was this.

  I could see Ajay apply patience like slow pressure to a brake. “You’re going to meet someone, Connie,” he said.

  “Did she tell you I wrote you a note to give to you, and she lost it?”

  They both looked at me.

  “And there’s a photograph. She probably didn’t give you that either.”

  Ajay asked me, “What happened to your hand?”

  “A sledding thing. I’m fine.”