When We Disappear

by Lise Haines

  I will always wonder if, as we sat there at the breakfast table, Liz thought that it could have been us, that we could have swerved and hit a pole while she was home sculpting. That we could have been blown to kingdom come.

  I was about to ask if Mona had already had her breakfast when I looked up and saw her creeping from behind the kitchen door.

  I’ll never know how long she had been there, how much she heard.

  I didn’t say anything, not one thing—but I asked Mona again with my cloudy eyes never to tell anyone, especially her mother.

  The thing is, you live a decent life, you treat people well, you strive and work hard, you do everything you can to take care of your family, to protect them, to see them through, and then one day something terrible happens and that’s it. From then on that’s all you are—the man who did the terrible thing.

  You try to erase it by leading an even better life than you thought you were leading before, but there it is, sitting on your head, waiting for you.

  You come into this world with a good heart, and in a split second it stops.

  Mona

  Two nights after I came home to find Richard educating Lola on how people punch one another on TV, he didn’t show up after work. He didn’t call.

  When Lola asked if she could sleep in her own bed now, Mom said he was working late and she would figure out the bed situation very soon.

  Mom tried his cell a few times before she dropped off.

  Geary was the one to see the late news. He hurried down to his office and pulled my photographs out of the box. He showed them to Lettie, who had followed him through the dark studio. They waited on the line while I woke my mother and we found the end of the story on another news station.

  Mom gasped when she saw Richard escorted to a police vehicle. He didn’t even bother to cover his head with his jacket. He looked like his life had flown away from him like a hat the wind had grabbed.

  “He turned himself in.” I began to hyperventilate.

  “What? What are you talking about?” Mom said, getting up to find a paper bag.

  “Dorothy and Nan Kaminski,” I said.

  She had no idea what I was on about. She unfolded the lunch bag and handed it to me.

  When I had told her everything, my mother did not list what might have happened to me as a result of childhood trauma. She didn’t go into the shower to break down out of sight. Instead she held me and let me weep. I think she was relieved to recognize something she had known was there but could never quite make out, something that required a different type of lens.

  The next morning Mom took Lola to school the way she always did, but when she got home we sat at the kitchen table together and she called her brother on speakerphone. He had just arrived at his office.

  “It’s good you called me first,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about Lola’s plight.”

  I watched my mother restrain herself. Plight? she mouthed.

  “It’s possible that Lola’s living out of district could become problematic now,” he said as if she were stepping onto an ice rink with loose skates.

  My mother said, “I’ll be making enough on my current commission—and another I’ve signed a contract on—to find a place in Evanston if you’re willing to advance the money. The gallery is about to crate the first one up, so I’m almost there.”

  My uncle arrived in his lemon-yellow Mercedes and watched over it nervously from the living room windows, worried it would be stolen and chopped. When he glanced around long enough to take in our condition he shook his head. Mom was dressed in her best suit and heels with her hair up. She looked like a high-end model who had been dropped into a bad urban scene for a fashion shoot.

  That afternoon she grabbed a modest rental one block from a good neighborhood in Evanston in Lola’s school district.

  Money can be an impressive thing despite the tastelessness and greed that can travel with it. My uncle paid for the movers. This was a midmonth winter move, so he had no trouble finding a company. They wrapped our small life into lots of tissue paper and labeled everything.

  The gallery crew crated and moved the foreclosure tree while Mom supervised. By late afternoon we were ready to go. I dropped down to see Cynthia for a few minutes while Mom made sure nothing had been left behind. We had no intention of cleaning.

  When she was finished with aftercare, I picked Lola up and took her to an early dinner at the pancake house so Mom could get a few things in place. Lola was a little dizzy and chatty from an overload of syrup as I drove her to her new life. The movers had even assembled her bed.

  She inspected everything as if the floor might drop away or someone might leap out from a cabinet door and snatch it all back.

  That night Lola showed the first sign that she’d picked up our inability to sleep. Mom and I tried everything. Finally Lola crawled into bed with Mom and I got in with them. Our mother looked weary but glad to have us close. An old foreign film was going with the volume on low, Jean-Paul Belmondo’s voice the only thing that seemed to work on us. If I had photographed the moment, I would have shot it through the filmy TV screen, the edges of the frame blackened out, the center aglow.

  It had warmed to sixty degrees for three days running when Lola mentioned Richard for the first time. She and I had taken a walk near the lake to a park she liked.

  “He’ll keep you in his heart,” I said.

  We sat down on adjacent swings. Lola kicked at the wood chips.

  “Have you cried?” she asked me.

  “I think I will eventually,” I said.

  “Me too,” she said. “Eventually.”

  I pushed her on the swing for a while, doing a couple of underpushes. Afterward she went down the slide several times while I got out a snack. We sat on a bench and looked out toward the lake.

  “I saw you from the living room windows,” she said, “when Mom’s TV woke me up.”

  I wasn’t sure what she was saying at first. “At the old apartment?”

  “I’m going to walk on air someday,” she said.

  Maybe this is how loss puts things together—that feeling of being suspended out in space. Lola had a book on the circus, and I thought she might be thinking of tightrope walkers. Or maybe when the lights were on in the living room and the curtains were open her reflection looked as if she were walking on air.

  Mom lined Lola up with the counselor at school, and she went for a few sessions of play therapy. It was the counselor who finally said, “More than anything, Lola needs play dates and social exchanges with her peers.” This was not easy for a girl whose father was sitting in a holding facility for a hearing that would take more than a year to happen. It had, after all, become a news item. The counselor reached out to a couple of the mothers she thought might be receptive. She explained that Lola’s parents were in the final stages of a divorce, that she would not be seeing the father again. And that Elizabeth was an exceptional artist who had donated a work to the children’s museum.

  I stopped in to see Cynthia before one of my shifts at the comic book store. She told me that Anna Lily had been taken away in an ambulance and never returned.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” Cynthia said. “After a month the super cleaned out the apartment and loaded up the dumpster with a ton of photo boxes, and then there was a For Rent sign outside. What a miserable way to go.”

  I felt sick. “You pulled them out, right?”

  “The boxes?”

  “The photographs, the negatives!”

  “I looked at some of them. They were just a bunch of down-and-out people. I guess the camera wasn’t empty.”

  “Do not tell me they came and emptied the dumpster.”

  “Weeks ago.”

  “I need the super’s number.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, now.”

  Cynthia dug it out of a drawer, and I called while she got dressed for a party.

  The super took the opportunity to crab abou
t the way we had left the apartment. I made some vague sound, not wanting to get into it with him, and asked if he knew anything about Anna Lily—if he had saved anything.

  He said, “I got a couple hundred bucks for the cameras. If you find her, I’ll send her a check.”

  “A couple hundred bucks?”

  I didn’t say he had destroyed Anna Lily’s life’s work, that irreplaceable vision. I didn’t say he had squandered thousands of dollars of honesty machinery. I didn’t say anything before I hung up.

  I had the prints I had made. That’s all that was left.

  Richard

  I lift the receiver and look at her for a long time through the plexiglass. “How was the motel?”

  “Cheap,” she says.

  “And the drive?”

  “Flat. You know … Illinois.”

  I take a seat in the booth and look up to where a fluorescent bulb buzzes, a surge of light washing over us. She has made sure not to wear a sundress, a hat or cap, a skirt two inches or more above her knees, or a sleeveless blouse—just jeans and a T-shirt that doesn’t say a thing in the world, all according to regulations. She’s left her phone in the van, another rule, and this means she can’t photograph me in this state of wildness. I have paced for months in a few feet of space, sometimes slamming my body against one of the walls, hoping to break through.

  “Are you ever out of your cell?” she asks.

  I try out different thoughts to locate one that might put her at ease. A full visit is forty minutes. I’m determined not to waste it. I tell her, “Yes. Most days.” I don’t say that my lower extremities have gone numb except for an occasional tingle in the balls of my feet and even out in the yard the air smells like an open toilet. I don’t talk about what goes on here. Despite everything my hair is clean and neatly run through with a comb today, my uniform pressed.

  “Tell me about Lola,” I say, stretching one leg out and then the other.

  “I brought a drawing of a funny three-legged horse she did the other day. The colors are wonderful. And a book Mom said she liked.”

  “Did she ask you to bring it?”

  The question hovers for a moment but goes unanswered.

  “And I brought a carton of unfiltered cigarettes,” Mona says. “I probably won’t be able to drive down this winter. Not until the van is fixed. Let me know when you need something.”

  “I thought I kept that a secret from you,” I say, maybe more to myself than anything.

  “What? I don’t—”

  “My smoking.”

  “I used to steal your cigarettes,” she says.

  I want to appreciate her ingenuity instead of harping on her, so I laugh a little.

  She removes her sunglasses. Maybe she got up too late to put on makeup. I think she looks prettier this way, more comfortable somehow.

  “When I get back on the highway, I’m going to drive down and photograph the ruins of Cairo.”

  “You’ll have to show me next time you come.”

  “I try … I try to imagine what it’s like for you, unable to tell your stories to anyone,” she says.

  I don’t say that I tell them to the people who crowd into my cell at night. I don’t say that she’s one of them. I move the phone to my other ear to catch something in her voice that might signal love, not just pity.

  “How can they make the only time eight twenty on a Tuesday morning down in nowhere Illinois?” she says loud enough for the guard with the small mouth and long jaw to hear—as if he set the rules and built the walls and added the concertina wire in thick coils several deep around the entire perimeter. “There must be other people … plenty of relatives who live in Chicago who want to come down. It’s a six-hour drive if you stop at all.”

  “But then the guards would have to deal with a whole lot of visitors,” I whisper. Maybe this particular guard won’t get annoyed by Mona’s remark. He’s young and fairly new, keen to impress the assistant warden, but he will talk to one of the other guards about this exchange if he’s asked, and the seasoned guard could come after me for insolence, looking for any small privilege left to take away. I worry often that I could lose my lined paper and my pencil, my envelopes.

  “Is this your second visit or your third?” I ask. She’s been my only visitor so far. The oddness, that I’m not sure, stops both of us.

  “Third,” she says.

  “Maybe I told you I’m reading the dictionary. The whole thing starting with A. Did you know that fluorescence is about blooming or flowering?” I crane my neck and look at the bulb as if it might be a manifestation of something divine, permitting me to see my daughter in different lights: now the hard one, now the softer one, now the one that might finally have a chance to bloom.

  “All I want is a photograph,” I say. “I have one of you and Lola. I’d like one of your mother. Maybe you could catch her when she’s at her happiest?”

  “There’s one of the two of you in Muir Woods. You always liked that one.”

  “Yes.” I nod. “If it’s unframed and you crop me out, that should be okay.”

  Mona

  From the sky it’s more about seeing patterns: the way a river snakes out into tributaries; farmland threads into quilts. It’s different seeing things from the road. I am content to ride for miles, stopping to photograph some of the natural wonders. But mostly I focus on the state of ruin in the small towns, the people trying to get by. Ajay says I have become a self-appointed WPA photographer.

  We put a check in a notebook by each monument we explore. Ajay made reservations to see Keet Seel. This means a nine-mile hike in and back. The Ancestral Puebloans or Anasazi built their homes into the earth, and ears of corn and pottery shards are still scattered on the ground. Some people believe the Anasazi disappeared, he says, but they probably migrated and joined other tribes.

  We spend a night at the Grand Canyon, sit out on the deck of the North Rim Lodge with drinks and talk about Ghost Ranch, what it would be like to descend into the canyon.

  “I can’t take it in,” I say.

  “Right?” He reaches down into his daypack to hand me the Nikon he’s added to his weight.

  “Where would I even start?”

  “Helicopter ride?”

  “No, I like that I can’t take it in. I like this idea of awe.”

  “Awe it is,” he says and puts his feet up.

  Anywhere I can find an Internet café, I Skype with Mom and Lola. Ajay talks with his grandfather by phone. He’s staying with an old friend while we’re away, and his truck has become Ajay’s truck. Sometimes we talk about how much we’ll have to deal with when we get home.

  Two weeks after we hit the road we pull into Joshua Tree National Park. We have a site at Indian Cove. Driving around in the thick air we find our numbered spot with a fire pit and picnic table. We arrive at a place hotter than a Chicago summer.

  Spreading a tarp, we set up the tent, unroll the pads and sleeping bags, and drop the pillows on top. We get out the wood we bought at the last gas station and arrange it in the fire pit so it will be ready to light. I wash down the table from our five-gallon water jug and set up the stove. Ajay puts the cooler and dried goods in the iron lockbox.

  We have some light left, and I suggest we walk one of the trails to get away from the other campers and the noise of the generators. The trees are mysterious with their waxy resin trunks and small knife-like leaves. The sun starts to drop, making Ajay’s face almost golden. The short chopped hair, the markings on his arms and chest. I wish I had my camera with me in this moment, but we left our valuables locked in the truck.

  Soon it gets dark and peaceful, and we follow the lights of the campfires.

  We’re starving as if we haven’t eaten for days, and I light our fire first thing. Ajay cuts up vegetables and cooks them with potatoes and fried eggs over the fire, and then we put our feet up and eat under the stars.

  After the dishes are washed and put away, the food stored again, we get into the tent. It isn’t
cool enough yet to be under the sleeping bags with the campfire going, though I know it will get cold soon, the way the desert changes at night. We lie on top of the bags for now, watching the fire. I’ve lived off grief too long. Both of us have. We curl into each other and feel our ribs expand and contract.

  When I drop off I travel east toward the light. A thermal lifts me over abandoned warehouses, razed lots and speedways, empty rodeos, vacant strip malls. Some towns are half missing, and closed signs are tacked up like quarantine notices.

  A wind pulls at me until I hover over the Grand Canyon, feeling for a moment like a young girl, the way my father would hold my body afloat in a pool when I first learned to swim.

  In the walls of the canyon I see the layers of earth I studied in the national monuments book to prepare for the big family trip. Kaibab Limestone, Hermit Shale, Bright Angel Shale, Vishnu Schist. I get lost in naming them. Earth and pine smells fill my head. The Colorado River looks small beneath me, though I can only see a portion of it. I fall end over end through the shade.

  Acknowledgments

  To my daughter Sienna Haines who gives so much love and support to my heart and work, always willing to offer sage advice. My special thanks to her for creating the new website for my books. To my stepdaughter Charis Haines for her love and inspiration. To the agent of my dreams Esmond Harmsworth and his remarkable insight, faith, generosity and joie de vivre. To Fred Ramey, brilliant publisher and remarkable ally, as we celebrate our third book together. I am filled with gratitude for his impeccable editing, trust and immense care with every detail of this book. To Greg Michalson the other half of the amazing Unbridled Books. To Lee Pelton, Michaele Whelan, Robert Sabal and Maria Koundoura for the gift of their support. To the Emerson College Writing, Literature and Publishing faculty and our talented students. My thanks to Ragdale and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts for much needed space and time to write. To my friends, especially Megan Marshall, Kerry Tomlinson, Rick Kogan, Pamela Painter, Richard Hoffman, Jennifer Freed, Mike Steinberg, Elizabeth Searle, Lane Stewart, Lyn Kustal, Jinx Nolan and Bob Livermore for their generosity. To my Chicago family, including Suzanne and Barry Cooperman, and Sandy Blau for their encouragement, support and help with research. To my aunt Alice Kay who brought life to books during her many years in the publishing industry. She will be greatly missed at the launch. To my grandfather Charlie Kay and the print shop he owned and ran for many decades in Chicago’s Printer’s. Row. To Alex Ebel for his help and wit. My thanks to the writing community and its Boston anchor, PEN New England. Thanks to Read To A Child for the reminder that it all begins early with a shared love of books. To Chicago my first home, Santa Barbara my second, and Boston my third.