Vanishing Acts

by Jodi Picoult

  "And you didn't tell me?"

  "I couldn't tell you, Delia."

  "What else are you holding back?"

  A hundred answers run through my mind, from details of conversations I have had with Andrew in jail to the deposition I took from Delia's former nursery school teacher, things that she is better off not hearing, although she would never believe me if I told her so. "You're the one who wanted me to represent your father," I argue. "If I tell you the things he tells me, I get tossed off the case, or disbarred. So, you pick, Delia. Do you want me to put you first ... or him?"

  Too late I realize I never should have asked that question. She shoves past me without saying a word, and strides down the hallway.

  "Delia, wait," I say, as she steps into the elevator. I put my hand between the doors to keep it from closing. "Stop. I promise; I'll tell you everything I know."

  The last thing I see before the doors close are her eyes: the soft, bruised brown of disappointment. "Why start now," she says.

  The taxi drops me off at Hamilton, Hamilton, but instead of going into the office building I take a left and start walking the streets of Phoenix. I walk far enough that the tony stucco storefronts disappear and I find myself in places where kids in low-riding pants hang out on the corner, watching traffic without flicking their yellow eyes. I pass a boarded-up drugstore, a wig shop, and a kiosk that reads CHECKS CASHED in multiple languages.

  Delia is right. If I managed to figure out a way to keep her from knowing what her father told me, surely I would have been able to figure out a way to keep the Bar Association from knowing what I might have told her. It doesn't matter that, in terms of legal ethics, I shouldn't have disclosed to her any information about her father's case, or her own absent history. It doesn't matter that I promised as much to Judge Noble, and to Chris Hamilton, my sponsor in this state. The bottom line is that ethics are a lofty standard, but affection ranks higher. What is the point of being an exemplary attorney in the long run? You never see that on anyone's tombstone. You see who loved them; you see who they loved back.

  I duck into the next store and let the air-conditioning wash over me. There is the unmistakable yeasty smell of cardboard cartons; the ching of a cash register. One wall is covered with the emerald green bottles of foreign wines; the entire back shelf is a transparent panorama of gins and vodka and vermouth. The full-bellied brandies sit side by side like Buddhas.

  I head to the corner of whiskeys. The cashier puts the Maker's Mark into a brown bag for me and hands me back my change. When I leave the store I twist off the cap of the whiskey bottle. I lift the bottle to my lips and tilt back my head and savor that first, blessed, anesthetic mouthful.

  And, like I expect, that's all I need for the fog in my head to clear, leaving one honest admission: Even if I had been free to tell Delia anything and everything, I still wouldn't have done it. As Andrew has been trying to explain for weeks: It was easier to hide the truth than to hurt her.

  So does that make me guilty ... or admirable?

  What is right, in the end, is not always what it seems to be, and some rules are better broken. But what about when those rules happen to be laws?

  Tipping the whiskey bottle, I spill the entire contents down a sewer grate.

  It is a longshot, but I think I've just found a way out for Andrew Hopkins.

  Delia

  By the time I reach my mother's house, my emotions are hanging by a thread. I've been lied to by Fitz and by Eric; I've been lied to by my father. I have come here because, ironically, my mother is my last resort. I need someone to tell me the things I want to hear: that she loved my father; that I have jumped to the wrong conclusion; that the truth is not always what you think it is.

  When my mother doesn't answer the doorbell, I let myself into her unlocked house. I follow her voice down a hallway. "How does that feel?" she asks.

  "Much better," a man answers.

  I peer through a doorway to find my mother gently tying a knot in a silk cord around a younger man's neck. Seeing me, he startles, nearly falling off his stool.

  "Delia!" she says.

  The man's face turns bright red; he seems incredibly embarrassed to have been caught, even fully clothed, with my mother. "Stay," she says. "Henry and I are finishing up."

  He digs in his pants for his wallet. "Gracias, Dona Elise," he mutters, shoving a ten-dollar bill into her hands.

  He's paying her?

  "You have to keep wearing your red socks, and your red underwear for me. Understand?"

  "Yes, ma'am," he replies, and he backs out of the room in a hurry.

  I stare at her, speechless for a moment. "Does Victor know?"

  "I try to keep it a secret." My mother blushes. "To be honest, I wasn't sure how you'd react, either." Her eyes suddenly brighten. "If you're interested, though, I'd love to teach you."

  It is then that I notice the rows of jars behind her, filled with leaves and roots and buds and soil, and I realize we are talking about very different things. "What ... is all this?"

  "It's part of the business," she says. "I'm a curandera, a healer. Sort of a doctor for the people doctors can't help. Henry, for example, has been here three times already."

  "You're not sleeping with him?"

  She looks at me as if I'm crazy. "Henry? Of course not. He's been hospitalized twice because his throat keeps swelling shut, but no medical professional can find anything wrong with him. The minute he walked in here, I knew it was one of his neighbors hexing him--and I'm working with him to break the spell."

  My own business involves things that cannot be seen, but it's rooted in the basics of science: human cells, attacked by bacteria, which create vapor trails. Once again, I look at this woman and think she is an utter stranger. "Do you honestly believe that?"

  "What I believe doesn't matter. It's what he believes. People come to me because they get to help with their cure. The client knots the special cord, or buries the sealed matchbox, or rubs the candle. Who doesn't want to have a hand in controlling their own future?"

  It was what I had thought I wanted. But now that I am starting to remember, I am not so sure. I touch my hand to the scar at my throat; the discovery that brought me here. "If you're a healer, why couldn't you save me?"

  Her eyes fall to the small hollow. "Because back then," she admits, "I couldn't even save myself."

  Suddenly this is all too hard. I am tired of putting up walls. I want someone with the strength--and the honesty--to break them down.

  "Then do it now," I demand. "Pretend I'm some client."

  "There's nothing wrong with you."

  "Yes, there is," I say. "I hurt. I hurt all the time." Tears pierce the back of my throat. "You've got to have some magic that makes things disappear. Some potion or spell or cord I can tie around my wrist that'll make me forget how you drank ... and how you cheated on my father."

  She steps back, as if she's been slapped.

  "What could you give me," I ask, my voice shaking, "to make me forget ... that you forgot about me?"

  My mother hesitates for a moment, and then walks stiffly to her shelves. She pulls down three containers and a glass mixing bowl. She opens the seals. I smell nutmeg, summertime, a distillation of hope.

  But she does not mix me a poultice or make a roux for me to swallow. She doesn't wrap my wrists with green silk or tell me to blow out three squat candles. Instead, she comes hesitantly around her workbench. She folds me into her arms, even as I try to break free. She refuses to let go, the whole time that I cry.

  It seems as if we have been driving forever. Ruthann and I take turns during the night, while Sophie and Greta sleep in the backseat. We head north on Interstate 17, passing places with names like Bloody Basin Road and Horsethief Basin, Jackass Acres, Little Squaw Creek. We pass the skeletons of saguaros, inside which birds have made their homes; and the smashed amber glass from beer bottles, which line the side of the road like glitter.

  Gradually, the cacti vanish, and deciduous tr
ees begin to pepper the foothills. The altitude makes the temperature drop, to a point where the air is so cool I have to roll up the window. Walls of striated red rock rise in the distance, set on fire by the rising sun.

  I'm not running away, not really. I just sort of invited myself to accompany Ruthann on a trip to visit her family on Second Mesa. She wasn't too keen on the idea, but I pulled out all the stops: I told her that I thought it was important for Sophie to learn about the world; I told her that I wanted to see more in Arizona than the jail system; I told her that I needed to talk to someone, and that I wanted it to be her.

  As we drive, I tell Ruthann about Fitz's story for the Gazette. I tell her about the scorpion sting, and what I remembered about Victor, and what Eric already knew. I don't tell her about my mother. Right now, I want to keep that moment to myself, a silver dollar tucked into the hem of my mind to take out in an emergency.

  "So you really begged to come to Second Mesa because you're angry at Eric," Ruthann says.

  "I didn't beg," I say, and she just raises a brow. "Well, maybe just a little."

  Ruthann is quiet for a few seconds. "Let's say Eric had told you that your mother had been having an affair when he first found out. Would it have kept your parents from splitting up? No. Would it have kept your father from running away with you? No. Would it have meant that your father wouldn't have been arrested? Nope. Far as I can tell, the only purpose served by telling you would be to get you even more upset, kind of like you are now."

  "Eric knows how hard this is for me," I say. "It's like doing a jigsaw puzzle and going crazy because I can't find the last piece, and then realizing that Eric's had it stashed in his back pocket."

  "Maybe he's got a reason for not wanting you to finish that puzzle," Ruthann says. "I'm not saying what Eric did was right. I'm just saying it might not be wrong, either."

  We drive on in silence to Flagstaff, and then veer right onto a different road. I follow Ruthann's directions to a turnoff for Walnut Canyon. We park in a lot next to a ranger's truck, but the gates aren't open yet. "Come on," Ruthann says. "There's something I want you to see."

  "We have to wait," I point out.

  But Ruthann just gets out of the car and reaches into the backseat for Sophie. "No we don't," she says. "This is where I'm from."

  We climb over the gates and hike down a trail into a canyon that opens up like a seam between the scarlet rocks. Prickly pear and pinyons grow along the track like markers. The path winds tightly, a sheer four-hundred-foot drop on one side and a wall of rock on the other. Ruthann moves quickly, stepping over the narrowest of passes and crawling around spires and through crevices. The deeper we get, the more remote it seems to be. "Do you know where you're going?" I ask.

  "Sure. My worst nightmare used to be getting lost in here with a bunch of pahanas." Turning, she flashes a smile. "The Donner party ate the Indians first, you know."

  We descend into the canyon, the gap between our path and the facing mass of rock growing narrower and narrower, until we have somehow crossed onto the other side. Sophie is the one who spots it first. "Ruthann," she says, "there's a hole in this mountain."

  "Not a hole, Siwa," she says. "A home."

  As we get closer I can see it: Carved into the limestone are hundreds of small rooms, stacked on top of one another like natural apartment buildings. The walkway spirals around the mountain, until we reach the mouth of one of the cliff dwellings.

  Sophie and Greta, delighted by this carved cave, run from the cedar tree twisted into the mouth of the doorway to the back of the hollowed room. The rear wall is charred; the space smells of brittle heat and fierce wind. "Who lived here?" I ask.

  "My ancestors ...the hisatsinom. They came here when Sunset Crater erupted in 1065, and covered their pit houses and the farms in the meadows."

  Sophie chases Greta around a small square of rocks that must have been a fire pit. It is easy to imagine a family huddled around that, telling stories into the night, knowing that dozens of other families were doing the same thing in the small spaces surrounding them. There is a reason the word belonging has a synonym for want at its center; it is the human condition.

  I turn to her. "Why did they leave?"

  "No one can stay in one place forever. Even the ones who don't budge, well, the world changes around them. Some people think there might have been a drought here. The Hopi say the hisatsinom were fulfilling a prophecy--to wander for hundreds of years before returning to the spirit world again."

  Across the way, on the trail we've come in on, the day's first tourists crawl like fire ants. "Did you ever think that maybe you've got it upside down?" Ruthann says.

  "What do you mean?"

  "What if the whole kidnapping experience isn't the story of Delia?" she asks. "What if disappearing wasn't the most cataclysmic event of your life?"

  "What else would be?"

  Ruthann lifts her face to the sun. "Coming back," she says.

  The Hopi reservation is a tiny bubble inside the much larger Navajo reservation, spread across three long-fingered mesas that rise 6,500 feet above sea level. From a distance, they look like the stacked teeth of a giant; closer, like batter being poured.

  Almost twelve thousand Hopi live in small clusters of villages, and one of those, Sipaulovi, sits on Second Mesa. We park at a landing and hike up a hill, over shards of pottery and bones--an old habit, Ruthann tells me, from when families would bury food in the ash of their housing foundations to keep from going hungry. We reach a small, dusty plaza at the crest of the mesa, a square surrounded by one-story houses. There aren't any adults outside when we arrive, but a trio of little children, not much older than Sophie, dart in and out of the shade between the buildings, appearing and disappearing like ghosts. Two dogs chase each other's tails. On the roof of one building is an eagle, with brightly painted wooden toys and bowls at its feet.

  Through the windows of the houses I can hear music--recorded native chants, cartoons, commercial jingles. There is electricity at Sipaulovi, but not at some of the other villages; Ruthann says that at Old Oraibi, for example, the elders felt that if they took something from the pahanas, the pahanas would demand something in return. Running water is a new thing, she says, dating back to the 1980s. Before that, you had to carry water in a bucket from a natural spring at the top of the mesa. Sometimes when it rains, there are still fish in the puddles.

  Ruthann corrals me, slipping her arm through mine. "Come on," she says, "my sister's waiting."

  Wilma is the mother of Derek, the boy we watched doing the Hoop Dance a few weeks earlier. I follow Ruthann to one house on the edge of the plaza, a small stone building with one facing window. She opens the door without knocking, releasing the rich smell of stew and cornmeal. "Wilma," she says, "is that noqkwivi burning?"

  Wilma is younger than I expected--maybe five or six years older than me. She is in the process of trying to brush a little girl's hair, in spite of the fact that the little girl refuses to sit still. When she sees Ruthann, a smile splits her face. "What would a skinny old lady like you know about cooking?" she says.

  The house is full of other women, too, wearing a rainbow of colorful housecoats. Many of them look like Wilma and Ruthann--sisters, aunts, I suppose. Hanging on the white walls are carved katsina dolls, like the ones that Ruthann told me about weeks ago. In the corner of the room is a television, crowned by a doily and a vase of tissue paper flowers.

  "You almost missed it," Wilma says, shaking her head.

  "You know me better than that," Ruthann answers. "I told you I'd be back before the katsinas left."

  From here the conversation slides into the streaming flow of Hopi that I can't follow. I wait for Ruthann to introduce me, but she doesn't, and even stranger, no one seems to think this is odd.

  The little girl who is having her hair brushed is finally freed from her chair, and walks up to Sophie. She speaks in perfect English. "Want to draw?"

  Sophie slowly peels herself away from me and nods,
following the girl into the kitchen, where a cup of broken crayons sits in the center. They begin to draw on brown paper, squares cut from grocery bags. I sit down next to an old woman weaving a flat plate from yucca leaves. When I smile at her, she grunts.

  The house is the strangest combination of past and present. There are stone bowls with blue corn being hand-ground into meal. There are prayer feathers, like the ones tied to Ruthann's paloverde tree and the ones left in Walnut Canyon. But there are also linoleum floors, Styrofoam cups, and plastic tablecloths. There's a Rubbermaid laundry basket and a teenage girl painting her toenails scarlet. There are two worlds rubbing right up against each other, and not a single person in this room seems to have trouble straddling them.

  Ruthann and Wilma are having an argument; I know this only because of the tone and volume of their words, and the way Ruthann throws up her hands and backs away from her sister. Suddenly there is a trilling cry--the low hoot of an owl, something I recognize from walking in the woods in New Hampshire. Immediately, the women begin to whisper and peer out the windows. Wilma says something that I would swear is Hopi for I told you so.

  "Come on," Ruthann says to me. "I'll show you around."

  Sophie seems happy coloring; so I follow Ruthann outside to the plaza again. "What's going on?" I ask.

  "There's a ceremony tomorrow, Niman. It means the Home Dance. It's the last one, before all the katsinas go back to the spirit world."

  "I meant with Wilma. I guess I shouldn't have come, after all."

  "She's not angry because you're here," Ruthann says. "It's the owl. No one likes to hear them; it's bad luck." We have walked down a narrow footpath that leads away from the plaza, and are standing in front of a small home made of cinder block. A tongue of smoke licks its way out the chimney. Ruthann shields her eyes and stares up at it. "This is where I used to live when I was married."

  I think about my own wedding ceremony, fallen by the wayside in the wake of my father's trial. "I wonder if Eric and I will ever get around to that."

  "The Hopi way takes years. You do the church thing, to get that out of the way, and you find a place to live, but it takes years for your groom's uncles to weave your tuvola, your bridal robes. Wilma had already had Derek by the time her Hopi wedding came. He was three years old, and walked with his mother during the ceremony."