Vanishing Acts

by Jodi Picoult

  We are both thinking this, and it reminds us that this is not just any reunion. Victor clears his throat. "Why don't you two sit down inside?"

  Her house is decorated with bright Talavera pottery and wrought iron. As we walk into the living room, I look for clues that will tell me more: toys that speak of other children or grandchildren; the titles of music CDs on the shelves; framed photos on the walls. One catches my eye--it is a snapshot of my mother and me, wearing matching embroidered dresses. I'd seen a similar photo, maybe taken the minute before, or after this one, in my father's secret stash.

  "I'll get some iced tea," Victor says, and he leaves my mother and me alone. You would think, when there is so much to say, that it comes easily. But instead we sit in an uncomfortable silence. "I don't know where to start," my mother says finally. She looks down into her lap, suddenly shy. "I don't even know what you do."

  "Search and rescue. I work with a bloodhound, and we look for missing people," I say. "It's crazy, given the circumstances."

  "Or maybe it's because of them," my mother suggests. She folds her hands in her lap, and we look at each other for another moment. "You live in New Hampshire ...?"

  "Yes. My whole life--" I say, before I realize that isn't true. "Most of it, anyway." I dig in my pocket for the photo I've brought along of Sophie, and pass it to her. "This is your granddaughter."

  She takes the picture from me and pores over it. "A granddaughter," my mother repeats.

  "Sophie."

  "She looks like you."

  "And Eric. My fiance."

  I'd hoped that by seeing my mother some floodgate would open, and all the gaps in my mind would be filled with memory. I'd hoped that some reflex recollection would take over, so that when I heard her laugh or saw her smile or felt her touch, it would be familiar, instead of new. But after that initial embrace, we've gone back to what we really are: two people who have just met. We can't rebuild our past, because we haven't even leveled common ground.

  For years, I'd sketched my mother out in my mind by stealing bits and pieces of other people's lives: a woman who stood in the town pool, coaxing her tiny daughter to jump off the side into her arms; a fairy-tale character who died tragically young; Meryl Streep in Sophie's Choice. Any of those women, I would have known in an instant; I would have been able to fall into easy conversation. Any of those women would have known what I have been doing all my life. In none of my imaginings was my mother Spanish-speaking, or remarried, or awkward. In none of my imaginings was she a total stranger.

  When your mother is made out of dreams, anything real is bound to disappoint you.

  "When is the wedding?" she asks politely.

  "September." At least, that was when it was supposed to be. I expected my father to give me away--before I learned he might be going to prison for not being able to do that in the first place.

  "Victor and I are celebrating our silver anniversary this year," my mother says.

  "Did you have children?"

  She shakes her head. "I wasn't able to." My mother looks down at her hands. "Your father ... did he remarry?"

  "No."

  She lifts her gaze to mine. "How is Charles?"

  It is strange to hear him referred to by that other name. "He's in jail," I say bluntly.

  "I never asked for that. I'm not going to lie--there was a time I was so angry at him for taking you I would have willingly sent him to prison for life--but it's been so long. The only thing I cared about, when the prosecutor called to tell me they'd found him, was you."

  I picture her standing in the driveway of this house, even though I know it isn't where I grew up. I imagine her expression at the moment she realizes I am not coming back. I see her face, but it has all of my own features.

  My mother looks at me, hard. "Do you ... do you remember anything?" she asks. "From before?"

  "Sometimes I have dreams," I say. "There's one about a lemon tree. And one where I come into a kitchen with broken glass all over it."

  My mother nods. "You were three," she says. "That wasn't a dream."

  It is the first time someone has been able to confirm a memory that I couldn't make sense of, and I feel my arms and legs go weak.

  "Your father and I, we had a fight that night," my mother says. "We woke you up."

  "Was I the reason you got divorced?"

  "You?" She seems surprised. "You were the best part of our marriage."

  The question, now, is burning a path up my throat; the words come out like fire. "Is that why he took me?"

  Just then Victor enters the living room, carrying a tray. There is a pitcher of iced tea, and cookies the size of a baby's palm, covered in powdered sugar. Under his arm is a shoebox. "I thought you might want this, too," he says, and he hands it to her.

  She is embarrassed by it. "I thought it might not be the right time," she tells him.

  "Why don't you let Bethany decide that?"

  "It's just some things I kept," my mother explains, pulling the rubber band free. "I knew that one day I'd find you. But somehow, I always expected you to still be four years old."

  There is a lacy christening cap, and the placard from the hospital bassinet with my name--my other name--written by a nurse in red ink, along with my weight: 6 lbs, 6 oz. A tiny china teacup with a chip in the handle. A square of paper with the carefully printed pencil letters of a child: I LV U.

  Proof, that once I did.

  The only other item in the box is a miniature patchwork quilt, made of triangles of red silk and orange shag and paisley print and sheer voile.

  My mother shakes this out over her lap. "I made this for you, when you were a baby, out of every bit of comfort I could find." She touches the red silk. "This came from a slip that once was my grandmother's. The orange was the throw rug from your father's dorm room. The paisley, a maternity dress of mine. And the voile, that came from my wedding veil. You ate with it and slept with it and I had to force you not to bathe with it. You used to hide underneath it when you were afraid ... like you thought it might make you disappear."

  I had forgotten my blanket. I want to go home, I'd told him.

  We can't, he said, but he didn't tell me why.

  "I remember," I say softly.

  I am four again: reaching up as she lifts me out of the bath; holding tight to cross a street; clutching this blanket with my fist. In a half hour my mother has managed to give me what my father couldn't: my past.

  I reach across my mother's lap to touch the blanket, wishing it still had the same magic powers that it used to, that I might press it to my cheek and rub the corner of it against my eyelids and know that everything is going to be all right by the time the sun comes up. "Mami," I say, because that is what I used to call her.

  I may not know my mother yet, but we have this much in common: Neither of us, it turns out, has been the only one who lost someone she loved.

  It is strange, suddenly having a memory come back out of nowhere. You think you're going crazy; you wonder where this recollection has been hiding all your life. You try to push it away, because you think you've hammered out the whole timeline of your life, but then you see that one extra moment, and suddenly you are breaking apart what you thought was a solid segment, and seeing it for what it is: just a string of events, shoulder to shoulder, and a gap where there is room for one more.

  There is so much I want to ask her; there are still so many questions.

  When I get back to the trailer, Fitz is fanning himself with the phone book and Sophie is asleep on the couch. "How did it go?" he asks.

  I have been thinking about what I should tell him--and Eric, for that matter. It's not that I have anything to hide, but there's something about talking about the fragile bridge my mother and I just built that in some way would diminish it. "She wasn't who I wanted her to be," I say carefully, "but that didn't turn out as bad as I expected."

  "What's she like?"

  "She's younger than my father. And she's Mexican," I tell him. "She grew up
there."

  Fitz laughs. "And to think, you failed Spanish."

  "Shut up."

  "Was she happy to see you?"

  "Yes."

  He smiles a little. "And are you happy you saw her?"

  "It's weird--not knowing anything about my own mother. But in a way, it's okay, because she doesn't really know anything about me. With my father, it was all imbalanced. He knew everything, and he kept it a secret."

  "Grandpa tells me his secrets," Sophie says, and we both look over toward the couch. She's sitting up now, her face still rosy with sleep. "Is he here yet?"

  I sink down beside her and haul her onto my lap. There are so many times that I've been seized with a need to hold Sophie--after a particularly sappy movie, after a near-miss car accident in an ice storm, when I'm watching her sleep--what would it be like to have someone take that right away from me? "What secrets does Grandpa tell you?" I ask.

  "That he bought the cheap grapes at the supermarket, even though he told you they were the organic ones. And that he's the one who put your white shirt in the washing machine and turned it pink." She turns to me. "I don't know if Grandpa's going to fit in this house with the rest of us."

  I look at Fitz. "Grandpa isn't going to be staying with us," I tell Sophie. "You know how the police came to the house the other day?"

  "You said they were playing a game."

  "Well, it turns out that they weren't, Soph. Grandpa made a big mistake, one that hurt a lot of people. And because of that, he has to go ... he's going to stay ..." I try, but I cannot summon up the words.

  Fitz kneels in front of us. "You know how you got a Time Out when you threw the tennis ball in the living room and broke the window?" Sophie nods. "Your grandfather has to live for a while in a place where grown-ups go when they get Time Outs."

  Sophie looks at me. "Did he break a window?"

  No, I think. Just my heart.

  "He broke the law," Fitz says. "So for now, he has to stay in jail until a judge says he can leave."

  Sophie considers this. "Bad guys go to jail. They wear handcuffs."

  "He's not wearing handcuffs and he's not a bad guy," I tell her.

  "What did he do?"

  "He took a little girl away from home," I say.

  "Didn't her mother tell her not to talk to strangers?"

  How do I tell Sophie that sometimes it's not strangers that prey on us; it's those we love who can do the most harm? "It happened a long time ago," I explain. "And I was the little girl."

  "But he was still your daddy, right?" Sophie shakes her head. "Daddies are allowed to take you places."

  "Not this time." I feel my throat close like a fist. "I didn't get to see my mother, not for lots of years--and I really missed her."

  "Why didn't you just tell him you wanted to go home?"

  It is too complicated to explain it all to Sophie. That there were lies involved, and aliases. That people you love don't usually come back from the dead. That I couldn't tell my father I wanted to go home because I didn't know I was missing.

  But now I do.

  On the drive back to the Madison Street Jail, I wonder if Sophie will remember this trip to Phoenix when she gets older. I wonder if she'll be able to picture the short spikes of a prickly pear, like stubble on a woman's leg; if she'll know her grandmother; if she'll have any memory of her grandfather before he was imprisoned.

  The truth is, she won't have to.

  That is my job. What is a parent, really, but somebody who picks up the things a child leaves behind--a trail made of stripped-off clothing, orphaned shoes, tiny bright plastic game pieces, and nostalgia--and who hands back each of these when it's needed?

  What is a parent but someone you trust to keep you safe, and to tell you the truth?

  I am pacing the small cubicle when my father is brought in to see me. I can't look him in the eye, so I focus instead on the cut on his face, a fishhook that curves down the side of his cheek. I pick up the phone to talk to him. "Who hurt you?" I ask, swallowing.

  "It'll be all right." He touches his face gingerly. "I didn't think you'd be coming back so soon."

  "I didn't think I would, either," I say. "I'm sorry I missed your arraignment."

  My father shrugs. "Plenty more where that came from," he says. "Is it true, what Eric said? That you wanted me to plead not guilty?"

  "I love you," I say, my eyes filling with tears. "I want you to do whatever it takes to get out of there."

  He leans closer to the glass between us. "That's exactly why I had to run away with you, Dee."

  "See, I could almost believe that. Except, I went to see my mother today."

  I watch his face go white. "How is she?"

  "Well, she's practically a stranger," I say.

  He splays his hand on the glass. "Delia--"

  "Don't you mean Bethany?"

  Shock squeezes through the telephone connection between us, a static silence. "Did you really have that bad a life?" my father asks tightly.

  "I don't know. I have no idea what it would have been like if I'd been brought up by my mother." When he doesn't answer, I keep talking. "Did you know she saved my baby blanket? The one with all the patches? The one that I wanted to go back for the day we left, but you wouldn't let me? Did you know that she still celebrates my real birthday? I didn't even do that, growing up."

  My father sinks down heavily onto the stool in the booth.

  "Maybe you can tell me what I'm missing," I say, my voice too high and thin. "Because the woman I spoke to was just as sorry as I was for having missed twenty-eight years."

  "I'll bet she's sorry," my father says, so quietly that I think I've misheard him.

  "What did she do to you?" I whisper. "What did she do that made you so angry you had to get revenge by kidnapping me?"

  "It wasn't what she did to me," my father answers. "It's what she did to you." A vein starts to throb in his temple. "We did go back for your blanket," he says. "We walked into the house, and you tripped over your mother, who was lying on the floor, passed out cold. And I can tell you exactly what your life would have been like, if she was the one who brought you up. You would have had to make yourself breakfast before kindergarten, because your mother was too hung over to do it for you. You would have had to check the toilet tank, to throw out the vodka bottle that was hidden inside. You would have wondered why she couldn't love you enough to want to stop. Your mother was a drunk, Delia. She couldn't take care of herself, much less a baby. That's the wonderful upbringing I took you away from. That's the truth I lied about. That's what I wanted you to miss."

  I stumble backward, the telephone line stretching like an umbilicus. I have learned this lesson over and over doing search-and-rescue work: If you choose to go looking for something, you'd better be ready for whatever it is you find. Because it may not be what you've been expecting.

  "I gave you the mother you didn't get," my father pleads. "If I'd told you the truth--if I told you what she was really like--wouldn't that have been worse than the way you lost her the first time?"

  For nearly a year after I was told about my mother's death, I would run to the door every time the doorbell rang. I was certain that my father had gotten it wrong. That any moment my mother was going to show up so that we could live happily ever after.

  But she hadn't. Not because she was dead, as my father had told me, but because she had never existed.

  I let the telephone receiver drop from my hand and turn around, away from the Plexiglas. I don't look back at my father, not even when he starts screaming both of my names and a guard comes to take him away.

  I have never been a very good drunk. Even when I was a student at UNH, a few beers would make me sick and hard liquor only made me hyperaware, prone to wondering why the tables had been stained the color of hazelnuts and whether anyone ever bothered to clean the flies out of the ceiling fan in the ladies' bathroom.

  I didn't know for a long time that Eric was an alcoholic. When Eric drank, he became
only more engaging and funny and amusing. He did it so seamlessly, in fact, that it took me several years to understand that the reason Eric always seemed to be the same person, whether he had a beer in his hand or not, was not because he didn't get drunk, but because he was hardly ever sober.

  The life of the party who can build geometric carbon models out of toothpicks and maraschino cherries and get a whole bar full of Japanese tourists to join in singing "Yellow Submarine" becomes less charming when that same person forgets he is supposed to pick you up after work and lies about where he has been all night, and cannot hold a conversation in the morning unless he's had some hair of the dog that bit him. I've hesitated this long to accept his marriage proposal because I didn't want my child to grow up with a parent who is unreliable and selfish.

  So how can I blame my own father for feeling the same way?

  When I pull into my mother's driveway again, I am so upset that I am shaking. My mother comes to the door mixing something in a mortar and pestle; it smells like rosemary. Her face lights up when she sees me. "Come on in."

  "Is it true?"

  "Is what true?"

  "That you're an alcoholic?"

  The smile dries on my mother's face, paint peeling. She glances around the street to see who might have heard, and ushers me inside. There is a part of me dying to be told that this, like so many other things, is just another fabrication of my father's. This is another step in his scheme to make me hate my mother, too.

  But she pushes her hair back from her face, tucks it behind her ears. "Yes," she says bravely. "I am." She folds her arms across her chest. "And I haven't had a drink in twenty-six years."

  An honest confession can slice the hardest heart in two. "Why didn't you tell me?"

  "You didn't ask," my mother says quietly.

  But it is a lie, even if you don't say it. It is a lie when you force a connection, because you so desperately want there to be one. It is a lie when you tell yourself that you will have lunches together and pass down secret recipes and do all the hundred other things that I have fantasized daughters do with their mothers, as if that might actually make us any less foreign to each other. No one gets to start where they left off; it just doesn't work that way.

  She reaches for me, and when I back away, her eyes fill with tears. "You came here, and you were so happy to see me," she says. "I thought if I told you, I'd lose you all over again."