How Quickly She Disappears

by Raymond Fleischmann

  “Sounds?” Elisabeth said, still catching her breath. Sitting rigid, she listened. “I don’t hear anything.”

  “But a moment ago,” Alfred said. “A moment ago—” He stepped toward the window. His eyes grew wider. His head craned forward. He looked at her. “You didn’t hear it?”

  No, she certainly hadn’t, whatever it was. The house had been quiet and was quiet still, silent except for Delma softly grunting, huffy little noises that she made whenever she was curious. Her “houndy humphs,” John called them. Delma had raised her head when Alfred first walked into the room, and now she was watching him intently. “No,” Elisabeth said. “I didn’t hear anything. What did it sound like?”

  Alfred stepped closer to the window. “Hammering,” he said, lifting back the window’s curtain and peering out. His hands were trembling. “Someone was hammering. Just a moment ago. Just outside. The whole house was shaking.” Pale with panic, he glanced at her. “You really didn’t hear it?”

  “Alfred,” Elisabeth said, “it’s almost three in the morning. Everyone is asleep.”

  “Not everyone.” Alfred swallowed, motionless, still listening. “It was the door,” he said, and he dashed across the room, fast enough that the papers in front of Elisabeth briefly lifted, jostled by the rush of his movements. He yanked the door open without a moment’s pause—the doors in Tanacross had no locks—but there was only emptiness outside, nothing more than the vacant wooden stoop. A wash of sunlight poured inside the house and the air smelled suddenly sweet, tinged with the Alaskan summer, woodsmoke and damp dirt mixing strangely with the acrid fumes of the Coleman lantern.

  “Someone was knocking,” Alfred said. “Someone was absolutely pounding.”

  He took a single step outside, looking right to left. Then, very slowly, as if he had just remembered something long ago forgotten, he bowed his head and walked back inside. His mouth gaped open. His eyes stared down.

  “Alfred—” Elisabeth began, but her voice disappeared.

  With his arms uncovered to his elbows, Elisabeth noticed something about Alfred that she hadn’t seen before: Dozens of scars covered his arms, scars that were ropy and wide. Crisscrossing in a hundred different directions, they rose from his skin in angry red slashes. It looked as though hives of insects were burrowing through his flesh.

  “Good God,” Elisabeth said. “What happened to your arms?” But immediately she caught herself; immediately she felt ashamed for asking such a thing so bluntly.

  No matter. Alfred didn’t seem to hear her. He turned away from the door and, still bowing his head, closed it behind him. Then he began to move back across the family room, shuffling—limping—in the direction of the bedrooms.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Pfautz,” he said, breathing harder now. He sounded as if he might break into tears. “I’m so very sorry.” Then, not far from the hallway, he paused in midstep, turning his head and staring straight at her. “What can you say about such a thing?” His voice was a breathless whisper. “What can you possibly ever say?”

  And with that he shambled away, dragging his feet, and the house was suddenly silent again.

  * * *

  —

  The following day, Alfred acted like a different person. He was quiet and aloof, but more than anything he seemed dejected. His head hung low and his eyes were glassy and distant, the eyes of a much older man. He looked weary and hopeless. He reminded Elisabeth of how her father had looked in the final year of his life.

  At breakfast, Alfred said very little, ate very little. Seated at the table across from Margaret, he stared almost constantly at the red leather cover of her encyclopedia, its golden letters glinting in the sunlight pouring through the windows. When Elisabeth asked if he was feeling ill, Alfred only shook his head.

  “Not so much ill, no,” he told her. “I’ve just lost my appetite.”

  He certainly had. Alfred mostly poked at his food—over-easy eggs and cracked wheat—and he drank only a few sips of black coffee. He never mentioned the episode from earlier that morning, and Elisabeth didn’t have the nerve to bring it up herself.

  “Mrs. Pfautz,” Alfred said now, looking up from his food, “I really do appreciate your hospitality.” He waited for a second, studying her. “You know that, don’t you?”

  Elisabeth swallowed a bite of egg. Beside her, Margaret ate as though she wasn’t listening to the conversation. Her eyes were trained on Delma, who sat in front of the door, head high, tongue hanging, hot from the heat spreading out from the kitchen and the wood-burning stove.

  “Yes,” Elisabeth said. “I know that.” She made herself smile. “And I appreciate the thanks.”

  “You’re very kind,” Alfred said. “Very, very kind, Mrs. Pfautz, so I really do hate to ask for anything else, but I have something more.”

  Something more, Elisabeth thought, and she realized that she had been expecting something more all along, expecting it from the first moment Alfred had spoken to her on the landing strip.

  “What is it?” she said, and she tried to seem more concerned than reluctant, more intrigued than apprehensive.

  “I need to stay a little while longer,” Alfred said. “One of my ailerons isn’t working quite right. I could fly with it unrepaired, and that was what I had planned to do, but the more I think of it, the more I’d rather fix it. Not take the chance, you know.” He stammered for a second, shaking his head. “I’ll need to stay another night, maybe two, if that would be all right.” He paused, blinking. “Would that be all right?”

  And again Elisabeth felt cornered, as though there was only one answer she could give. But as much as she felt trapped by the obligations of their post, she felt even more trapped by her own recalcitrance. She had dug in her heels with Mack—shrugged away his worries—and in doing so she had already given her answer to Alfred. She had already made her commitment. Yes, of course. Stay as long as you need to stay. That’s fine. Everything is fine.

  “Ailerons,” Margaret said, now holding her encyclopedia, “are hinged airfoils located on the trailing edge of aircraft wings. They control lateral balance and are necessary for banking turns.”

  CHAPTER 4

  For as long as you can remember, you’ve talked about running away. But you’ve never really thought that it would happen.

  Jacqueline has a surprise for you. Two surprises, actually, and they both involve The Plan. That’s what you’ve always called it. The Plan. It’s easier to talk about when it’s reduced to so little. Two words. It doesn’t seem so scary. It doesn’t seem so big. And it certainly doesn’t seem like something real. It’s just The Plan, something that you and Jacqueline have talked about all your lives.

  But suddenly it seems like it’s more than just talk. These surprises are big, whatever they are, and they have to do with running away. Jacqueline has made that clear, but she’s offered no further hints. Still, you can hear a nervous tremble in your sister’s voice. You can feel the energy fluttering all around her. The excitement. Something is happening, or has happened already.

  Dutifully, you await her word to open your eyes. You’re sitting on the dusty floor of your father’s workshop. Closed eyes or not, you know this place as well as your own bedroom, and you scan the shop in your mind’s eye, taking inventory. There are gears the size of bicycle tires above your head. Belts string across the ceiling like party streamers. Hundreds of tools cover the walls. A coal forge stands beside the shop’s only window. You’re flanked by worktables streaked with grease stains, and an anvil sits on a hickory stump behind you. The air smells thick with oil and shaved metal. You draw a deep breath. Try to relax. Your mouth is dry.

  “Is it going to be much longer?” you say.

  “Just a minute,” Jacqueline says. “Wait a little longer.”

  She sits down across from you, and then you hear the shuffle of her working. She’s setting something between the two of you.
Laying something, piecemeal, on the floor. A deck of cards? Books? Magazines?

  You wait for a minute, and then your sister is quiet, as if studying the work that she’s just completed. Outside, the sun is setting, and the crickets and katydids have begun to rattle. It’s July, and the weather is hot, but here inside the shop it’s cool.

  “Come on,” you say. “Let me open my eyes.”

  “Wait,” your sister says. “There’s something else. Just wait.” And then she’s working again, making some final adjustment. “All right,” she says. “Open your eyes.”

  Though it wouldn’t make much sense, you expect to see a line of playing cards with naked women on them. Months ago, Jacqueline found a deck of cards like that beneath the pillow on your father’s bed. There were naked ladies seated on couches, on stairways, on rocks in the ocean surf, waves breaking in curtains around their shoulders. The aces showed women with their legs spread open, and the jokers showed a woman with a banana held between her breasts.

  “Look at how big her nipples are,” Jacqueline had said. “And look at how dark.”

  But when you open your eyes, it’s not naked women looking up at you. In two even rows on the floor, Jacqueline has arranged ten stacks of dollar bills. It’s the most money you’ve ever seen, and the sight of it is so surprising that you actually jolt, rearing back your head. Beside it, she’s laid a square of paper that reads, in ornamental writing, For Jacqueline, Meine Hausherrin. It’s beautiful script, practiced and sure of itself, but it’s hard to take your eyes away from the rows of money. It’s so much money.

  “A hundred dollars,” your sister says, her eyes gone wide, “and it’s ours.”

  You’re still for a moment. Stunned. Then you reach out, lift a stack. Your sister smiles, watching you with a kind of awe, as if even she can’t quite believe the surprise she’s revealed. The money feels crisp. With it closer to your face now, you can smell it. It smells sharp but somehow nice, like a freshly painted room.

  “Where did you get this?” you say, glancing at the note.

  Jacqueline grins. “A little bird.”

  “What little bird?”

  “What difference does it make? It’s ours.” She scoots closer and sits up on her knees. “Do you know what we can do with this money?”

  You’re still marveling at the sight of it. “What?”

  “Lots of things,” your sister says. “We can buy train tickets. We can run away. We can go on an adventure.”

  “An adventure?”

  She nods.

  “Where?”

  “Any of the places we’ve talked about. New York. Los Angeles. Texas.” She’s talking fast. She’s positively bursting. “Alaska,” she says. “Anywhere. We can do anything now.”

  And for the first time you realize that this is no longer just play—not to Jacqueline, it isn’t. To her, this is play and something much more—a world of adulthood dizzying in its scope and implication. You draw a deep breath. Chew at the inside of your lip. You lay the money on the floor again, center it in its space in the row. Then you sit back.

  “Jacqueline—”

  “And I have something else, too,” she says.

  She springs to her feet and dashes across the workshop. Then she’s on her hands and knees, reaching behind the crates your father has stacked in one corner. She returns a moment later with something wrapped in a towel.

  “You’ll never guess what this is,” she says. “Not in a million years.”

  She hands it to you. It’s heavy and firm, the shape and heft of a fire poker, though not quite as long. You unwrap it, and the first thing you see is a golden crown emblazoned with an eagle, wings outstretched.

  It’s a dagger, and the crown caps the hilt. It’s beautiful, more ornate and delicately fashioned than anything you’ve ever seen before. Its scabbard is wrapped in silver-plated filigree and ribbons, and the hilt is coiled pearloid. Your fingers trace the crown, searching with intention only half conscious, and soon your fingernails are gliding across the eagle, grazing the subtle peaks and paths of its feathers, the hook of its open beak.

  “Where is this from?” you say.

  “Germany,” Jacqueline says. “It’s from the war.”

  But that wasn’t what you were asking. “No, I mean, where did you get this?”

  “The same little bird.”

  “What are you talking about? Who are you talking about?”

  She reaches for the dagger and lifts it gently from your hands. Then she taps one fingernail against its scabbard, studying it as you just did, her eyes tracing over its length and detail. “Just someone I know,” Jacqueline says, paying more attention to the dagger than to her words. “A boy.”

  “What boy?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Why did he give you that?”

  She runs one finger over the filigree. “Because I liked it,” she says. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  “And he gave you the money, too? Why would he do that?”

  Jacqueline’s face drops. She glowers at you. Her mouth opens and her bottom lip juts out, just an inch. You hate that face—that irritated, “oh, be quiet” face. You hate it because you know it’s your face, too. She’s annoyed with you, and she’s going to scold you, and like so many times before, getting scolded by Jacqueline will feel like getting scolded by your own subconscious.

  “Yes, he gave me the money,” she says. “I already told you that, Elisabeth.”

  “But why?”

  “Because he’s kind,” Jacqueline says. “He’s my friend. He’s my financier.”

  She trips over that word, her tongue and cheeks trying too hard, and you can tell that the word isn’t her own.

  “Jacqueline—”

  “Oh, relax,” she says, setting the dagger on the floor. “This is incredible, don’t you see? This is a miracle. This is it.”

  Her face brightens, and then she’s bounding across the workshop, returning to the stack of crates. This time, she comes back with something you recognize: the neatly folded square of your map. National Roads of These United States, it reads in bold, black letters across the top, and that’s exactly what it is—a map of all forty-eight states and their major roads, which curl across the page like hundreds of interlocking rivers. Late at night, you and Jacqueline like to sit on the floor in your bedroom with the map laid out in front of you. It’s printed on a thick piece of paper worn soft with age and attention, and you love how it smells, a scent like wood saturated in rain. With a pair of calipers crafted by your father, Jacqueline will point to places on the map and say, Here. This is where we’ll run away to one day. Here. She’ll point to Dallas, Los Angeles, Seattle, a different place every time. It’s thrilling. It’s scary. But it’s only fantasy, or so you’ve thought.

  “Where should we go?” Jacqueline says now, unfolding the map on one of your father’s worktables. She runs both hands over it, flattening the seams. “I want to go to New York,” she says, “or Philadelphia. A place with lots of people.”

  You stand. Join your sister at the table. “But where will we live?”

  “We’ll live in a hotel. Cities have lots of hotels.”

  “Hotels are expensive.”

  “We have money now.”

  “But that will run out.”

  Jacqueline waits. Thinks. Then she smiles. “Maybe not.”

  “You’re being cruel, you know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just tell me.” You turn to the stacks of dollar bills again, staring in disbelief. It doesn’t seem right. It can’t be right. You feel like a criminal, or at least an accomplice to one. “Tell me who gave you that. You have to. I’m your sister.”

  Jacqueline sighs, making a show of it. A strand of her hair briefly rises with her breath, and she tucks it back behind one ear. She’s making that fac
e again—you can feel that face—but then it flashes into something else.

  “I’ll make you a deal,” she says. “I’ll tell you all about my little bird if you decide where we’ll go.”

  “Fine,” you say, in a hurry. “Chicago.”

  “No,” Jacqueline says. She pivots to face you. “I’m serious. Decide where we’ll go, and I’ll tell you.”

  “I did decide. I said Chicago.”

  “But you weren’t being serious.” She stares at you, unblinking, and then she steps closer. She takes your hand. “This is it,” she says. “The Plan. Our plan.” She squeezes your hand. Smiles. But it isn’t a fun smile. There’s something sad in your sister’s eyes, and instantly you feel like crying, though you can’t explain why. “Tell me,” Jacqueline says. “Where are we going, Elisabeth?”

  The crickets and katydids are gone. The air feels suddenly colder, and you can feel it stinging like ice inside your nose, your throat, your chest. And all the while, Jacqueline stares at you with eyes that seem brighter now—not their typical blue but a blue so intent that it’s nearly white.

  The decision is yours. You can answer Jacqueline or not. But if you do, you’ll be speaking much more than words. You’ll be making a commitment. A bond. With a single word, you can speak a new world into being. A new future.

  No, that can’t be right. You’ll name a city, and it’ll make no difference. Jacqueline can’t be serious. In her heart, she knows—as you do—that this is only play. Fantasy. Your answer will mean nothing. That weight is not on your shoulders. But still, when you speak, you quiver. The hairs on your arms stand stiff, and the space between your legs goes hot.

  “Philadelphia,” you say, because it’s the first word that you can pluck from the air. An automatic answer. An echo of Jacqueline.

  Your sister grins. Then she lets you go and the dazzling ring of sharpened metal bursts through the workshop. The dagger flashes, and like a pirate your sister drives the blade down onto the map. It sticks into the wood of the table and stands upright. She missed the clustered knot of Philadelphia, but by only an inch.