When We Disappear

by Lise Haines

  I got back in Liz’s van and sat there for a minute, trying to catch my breath. Turning on the engine, I drove to the spot where I had tied the fender up that day. I understood the angle at which I had traveled back across the road and how poor the visibility was from there. It would have been so easy to get into a second collision that evening. There is always some traffic on that road. Someone, more likely many someones, must have seen the accident. If so, they had passed by after the impact. Surely people had seen the car wrapped around the pole. But no one had been willing to stop and help or act as a witness.

  I got out of my car again, walked back, and sat on that cold square of concrete. I had stopped at a store on the way there and bought some of those things people place by roadside accidents: a cluster of plastic flowers, a Mylar balloon, and a stuffed animal. I arranged these at the site. I asked for forgiveness.

  There was only a trickle of traffic, and it was easy to cross the road without stop signs or lights. The walk was a little longer than I expected, but the sun would be out for another hour. I had the short winter jacket I used to wear when we went down the toboggan run years ago and a wool scarf that Liz had given me.

  Once I was a couple hundred feet from the water tower I stopped and took it in. I had forgotten my reading glasses, but I did my best to make out the warning sign on the fence. Other than stop and caution, the letters were blurry shapes, but it looked like the same sign my buddies and I had ignored in high school when we climbed to the top. I went through a break in the fence and slipped in freely.

  The ladder was cold but not icy. A glove wouldn’t fit over my bandaged hand, but I had put a fresh gauze wrap on that morning, making it extra thick, and this was held together with white medical tape. I wore a glove on the other hand.

  I started up the ladder. It wasn’t like back in the day, when we egged each other on and called the stragglers chicken and kept climbing. I stopped more than once, and when I realized how high I was getting I felt surges of panic. Several times I thought I couldn’t make it up another rung, but finally I got through the opening at the top and clambered around and held tight to the railing while I stood on the walkway ringing the tower. I circled the tank once, feeling light-headed and scared and at the same time a devotion to Liz and what we once were that had my heart bursting.

  Reaching the door that opened to the water supply, I gave the handle a tug, and just as it had when I was a teen, it opened. Inside was the dark cavern filled with all that quiet water. I remember my friends and I, calling into that tank, our voices echoing.

  I closed the door, stood back, and took everything in. There was Liz’s van. That’s where the pole sign once stood. I became aware of the houses edged close to the tower. Anyone in the surrounding area would have to be standing in their backyards practically looking through a pair of binoculars to catch sight of me. I saw a backyard fireplace going, a group of kids horsing around, one man smoking a cigarette in a lawn chair in the snow.

  The light was starting to turn. I couldn’t read the face of my watch, but I had a different sense of time at this height. There had to be a way for Liz to understand that over my entire lifetime she was it. She was the person I set my life to. She was the reason I thought about the future.

  I became intoxicated with the colors spreading across the tank and the plains as I held tight to the railing.

  I heard a siren on the road, a strong breeze picked up, and my scarf flew off into the air. In a moment of light and speed and the full impact of pain, I reached out toward the ladder and started to descend.

  Mona

  Mr. Kapur handed me an envelope with my name in thin letters, some with long, sweeping tails. It appeared to be written with the kind of ink that comes from a well. Inside, I found a dinner invitation for that evening. The cream-colored paper stock had turned yellow at the edges, and I imagined it was his wife’s or daughter-in-law’s stationery that he kept in a box of things he was unable to toss.

  I looked at his hopeful face and thanked him. “Are you going back downstairs, Mr. Kapur? I was just heading that way.”

  “I will accompany you,” he said and took hold of my arm. “My grandson tells me your father is a menace. And that your family must lie about where your sister goes to school because he has put you in a bad state.”

  “All of her friends are at the other school,” I said.

  “I understand. Did I say I would tell anyone?”

  “No, I didn’t mean …”

  “The world can be very cruel, very harsh. Ajay lost the best of fathers too early, and you have a father who is alive but does not act properly. I am sorry.”

  Mr. Kapur stopped, took a handkerchief out of his back pocket, and dabbed at his eyes. “Ajay tells me you are an accomplished photographer. So you study the way things are arranged. It is the same in mathematics and engineering. My son, he was an engineer. A brilliant fellow.”

  “I’m sorry you lost your children,” I said.

  “This is a terrible country,” he said. “I would not have lost him if we had stayed in India.”

  We were both quiet for a moment, stopping between the third and second floors.

  “Ajay told me just this morning that a family who cannot afford to buy a home must pay a greater percentage of their earnings to the government than a family who can. And now it seems this less fortunate family is supposed to pay for the homeowners who need to save their homes because the miserable bankers made them think they could purchase them with no money in their pockets and nothing in the bank. My grandson tells me the very rich can own several houses and pay no taxes at all. So we are paying for everyone. Things have always been backward here.”

  “The government should go after Wall Street,” I said.

  “Exactly. This should be so.”

  Mr. Kapur seemed pleased that we were in agreement. We continued down the stairs. “Maybe Ajay will buy you a home someday,” I said.

  “He told me he would design and build a home for me. He might have to make it a well-designed funeral pyre at this rate. But he is a smart boy. Maybe he will manage things. Do you like to photograph people or objects?” he asked.

  “People mostly, street photography.”

  “You should go to India.

  “I would love that.”

  “You are not like that other girl. She vexed me terribly. All she wanted was romance, romance, romance. She never left my boy alone when he had to study. She told me she wanted to marry him. But Ajay must establish himself before he turns his eye to family. Now, you will come to dinner tonight. And someday, when the time is right, you and the man who is right for you will have good jobs, and then you will get married and have an excellent family. Perhaps it will be my grandson. In any case, there is an order to everything,” he said.

  I wanted to say there isn’t really, that order fled long ago. But I didn’t want to depress Mr. Kapur.

  I put on a vintage ivory dress Mom had given me and a pair of cowboy boots. Lola came into my room, wanting to use my closet to dress in her PJs. I finished getting ready while she hid behind my hanging clothes.

  “Look in the yard,” she said.

  Mom’s sculpture shimmered in the lights from the L platform. I couldn’t see much with the backlight still out.

  “She’s making it for me,” Lola said.

  “Then she’ll put a plaque on the base with your name on it. This is very special, Lola.”

  I thought of Ajay when I tied up my hair in my bedroom mirror, leaving a few wisps to fall against my neck. It’s possible, for the first time outside the world of dreaming, that I had begun to feel an honest machinery work between us. I thought of taking a series of photographs of him that I would hang up in the darkroom just to watch the chemicals drip from the edges of the paper. It was becoming more difficult to push him away.

  As soon as my lipstick was on Lola popped out in her PJs and said she wanted to come too. I told her maybe next time. She could, however, use her stamp kit in my room as
long as she did her work on the floor and put newspaper down.

  Richard came home a short while later. After saying hello he asked if we’d mind if he took a shower. Mom said she should probably take the first one since she had to get dinner started and no one wanted bits of metal in the meal. He seemed to take this with good humor but I could see his look. He had become that person who was chronically in everyone’s way, filling up space no one had, using supplies no one could afford to replenish. Even Lola, who loved cuddling with Mom in the evenings, wanted her bed back.

  Mom got in the shower, and I knocked to come in. She stuck her head around the shower curtain. She looked tired, but I knew that pervasive mood when things had gone well with her artwork. This was a good tired.

  “That dress looks great on you,” she said. “Where are you off to?”

  “The Kapurs invited me to dinner. Thanks for taking it in.”

  “Do you think they’re making Indian food? I would die for some good Indian food.”

  It’s possible she was reconciling to the idea of Ajay.

  There was something about her use of the perfumed body splash on the tub’s edge, the eyeliner out on the counter. I thought she had stopped using these things altogether. Maybe I had forgotten to see my mother as someone separate from her obligations. Sitting on the toilet, I said in a low voice, “You aren’t in love with him again, are you?”

  There was a long pause as the shower continued to run, and I was about to repeat myself, thinking she hadn’t heard me, when she said, “I think I’m trying to find out.”

  I opened the door and heard his low, rolling voice. Lola had started to listen to another one of his stories. She had red and black ink on her hands, and this time she was almost pressed against his side. He had his arm poised to hold her around the waist. I watched as Lola got sleepy and entranced. I did not need to fly into her small frame, into her complicated heart to know how she felt. She would stand there, rocking back and forth, until he got to the scariest part, and then she would wait breathlessly until the hero appeared by inexplicable magic. I had been Lola once.

  Lola and Richard were glued to a pulp talk show when I walked in late from the studio the next night. She was stretched out on her bed, and he sat on a kitchen chair next to her. Her school worksheets were spread out along the floor as if they had cascaded from her fingers. Nothing had been started. On the TV a woman in a blonde wig belted a sad little man in the face, appearing to break his nose. The bouncers moved in. I hit the off switch and the screen went cold.

  He leapt to his feet. “Lola and I were watching one of her kid shows. The other program just came on.”

  “Lola, I want you at the kitchen table right now doing homework. Where’s Mom?” I asked.

  “You can see her from your room,” he said.

  “I want to see,” Lola said, rushing ahead of me.

  I looked back at him and said, “Lola gets a snack and does her homework first thing. And then she plays with her toys or reads. She has dinner, and after that she has a bath and is read to. She is asleep every single night by eight p.m.”

  He looked confused, though I didn’t understand why, and he said, “I’ll get it down.”

  From my bedroom Lola and I spotted Mom in the yard with her welding torch. She had a studio light rigged up again.

  “Did you have your snack yet?” I asked Lola.

  “I’m really hungry,” she said.

  I took my sister’s hand and we went into the kitchen, where I put a plate together with fresh apple slices and peanuts. “You can nibble while you work. Cookies tonight for dessert if you get started by the count of ten.”

  Lola rushed into the living room, gathered her papers, and spread them out on the kitchen table. I told her I’d be back up to check her work shortly. I raced down the back steps despite the shaky handrails that gave me the feeling I might plunge forward without anything to break my fall. Downstairs I found Mom on her haunches.

  “Do you have any idea what they were watching on TV?”

  She turned the flame down and tipped her face shield up.

  “Hi. What?”

  I told her about the woman who punched the man.

  Her cheeks reddened. “I’ll talk to him. Did he get her a snack?”

  “Of course not. That’s what I’m saying. Her worksheets were scattered all over the floor, untouched.”

  She shook her head. “I see.”

  “Do you? Do you see?”

  She turned off the torch and stood up. I turned to look at the tiny altarlike structure that Lola had made in one corner from the bits and pieces of metal Mom had found that were too small for her own work. I could see that Mom had done some welding to anchor it. When a breeze picked up, the dangling metal moved.

  “I have to get this section welded before the whole thing collapses,” Mom said. “Fifteen, twenty minutes at the most.”

  “Some of us are worried about Lola’s life collapsing.”

  “Ease up, Mona. I’m a sculptor, not a permanent trashout person. I have my first commission in two years. This means money for us. You know I would never do anything to put Lola in jeopardy.”

  As I looked away from her I realized that her sculpture was almost done. She had made a tree with leaves that shimmered in the slightest breeze like a quaking aspen. I moved closer to it and saw that she had used dog tags to make the leaves, each one stamped with an address.

  “You have a commission?”

  Examining her work with some insecurity, she said, “They’ve come out to see it once, and everyone’s very pleased, so …”

  “What are the addresses?” I asked.

  “Foreclosed homes,” she said. “I’ve only done a small portion of the ones I know about, but if I put any more on the whole thing will topple.”

  “How will you move it?”

  “The gallery will do it. Carefully. In sections.”

  We stood there for a while, and then I walked around it to consider it from different angles. She said, “I’ve asked your father to get his own place.”

  I didn’t say anything. He would still be able to see Lola. He would still pull on Mom.

  “I know there’s something else,” she said, trying to tease it from me.

  “I have to get upstairs,” I said.

  “I’m here whenever you’re ready.”

  “I know.”

  I began to climb the stairs. The way the handrail pushed back and forth, it was like a bone starting to pull from a socket.

  I sat in my room and traveled back to the night of the accident and my old bedroom. I had counted the glow-in-the dark moons on my ceiling, hoping to fall asleep. When that didn’t help I had lifted the blind on the window by my bed and gazed out at the lawn. I don’t know how long I was like that before I fell asleep and saw the smoke from the car again. Instead of streaming upward from the hood of the car, it was sucked back into the engine. The woman waved us off, and the little girl’s tears traveled up into her eyes. We drove backward to the restaurant where we had stopped so my father could have coffee while I had a malted, then along the edge of the road with the water tower, returning to the winning ticket, the Clubhouse at the race track, the drinks, the paddock, all the way to the dress my mother had laid out for me on the bed that morning as if she were setting it out for a funeral. Finally it was the morning before the accident, and I said to my mother, My stomach doesn’t feel right. And she said, Would you rather stay home today? You could certainly do that, love. But that never happened, and the blue station wagon rode my life. When a second explosion occurred the roof of the car blew off, and Dorothy Kaminski, holding Nan in her arms, flew into the air so hard I thought she was going to crack the sky in two with her skull. Her daughter was ripped from her at the last, and they began to fly.

  Richard

  Liz and I used to sit at the kitchen table and read the newspaper. There was the morning she read about an accident on that stretch of road between our home and the racetrack.

/>   Liz was in the eighth month of her pregnancy and often preferred to stand so she could breathe better. “It wasn’t far from the water tower,” she said. “Did you see anything?”

  “It must have happened after we went through,” I said.

  The spoon I was stirring, her words, the pain, all of it went in slow motion as I tried to look normal.

  “The husband was home waiting for their return from a shopping trip,” she went on. “I can’t imagine what that man is going …” Her voice faltered.

  “Try not to focus on sad things,” I said.

  “It’s just that … there are times …” She trailed off.

  “What?” I said.

  “Times you wish you could save the entire world.”

  That’s what she said.

  “Maybe after the baby comes and things settle into a routine,” she went on, “I can start volunteering at the senior center again. I’ve been collecting ideas for new art projects.”

  “We could both do that. I could teach them something about buying insurance, how to balance accounts, that kind of thing.”

  “I think they’d love that.”

  I cleared my throat and said, “Listen, before I forget to tell you, we stopped the car off for the tune-up.”

  “I thought that was next month.”

  “No, right on time. I decided it was easier to just leave it overnight so it would be the first car on the hoist. I’ve got a loaner.”

  “Oh, make sure they check the brakes. I’ve been hearing that sound again. And we really have to replace the back tires.”

  “They might keep it an extra day if they get stacked up. I’ll be putting in more hours at work after the baby comes. We should be able to cover things without using the credit card.”

  I wanted to say something more, some small suggestion that she really shouldn’t worry. Because she had been so anxious when Mona was pressed into her ribs, one night asking what if she had a stillborn or … a baby with vestigial wings. I told her that’s the trouble with having an overactive imagination. And she told me I needed to work on my sense of irony.