How Quickly She Disappears

by Raymond Fleischmann

  “Over here? Our house?”

  Teddy nodded. “He had a fight with Henry about it. They tussled some. Him and Buddy. So they—” Teddy started fiddling again with the top button of his shirt. For once, he had no candy cane to toy with, and his hands seemed restless. “Well, they restrained him. They had to. But still he wouldn’t quit about it. So I told him I’d come over here and ask if you’d be willing to talk to him. It was the only way he’d quiet down. He was waking the whole keey up.”

  Turning her head, Elisabeth stared through the window above the sink. And there it was: that ever-present wall of trees, a suffocating blend of green and gray and dirty brown that was closing around them like a clenching fist. Tanacross felt smaller than ever before—smaller and infinitely more isolated. They were a colony at the bottom of the sea. They were a speck of civilization on Mars. And they were all trapped here together. Then those words of Alfred’s came back to her—the wilds—and Elisabeth hated herself for thinking of them. She turned back to Teddy.

  “Did he say what he wants to talk about?”

  Teddy shook his head. “But I’m hoping you can get some more information out of him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s lying about the fight,” Daniel said. “He’s a goddamn liar, and we want to know what really happened.”

  “If he’s lying to you,” Elisabeth said, “why would he tell me the truth?”

  “Because he’s your friend,” Daniel said, and he glowered as he said that word, friend, as if he needed to make it any clearer how he felt about her right now.

  “We’re not friends,” she said, almost spitting as she spoke. “I didn’t want him here. I didn’t ask for him to stay. I had an obligation. I didn’t—”

  “Okay, okay,” Teddy said, pumping his hands. “I get that. I know that, even if Daniel doesn’t,” and he glared at Daniel over his shoulder. “But the point is, we don’t know what he wants to talk to you about, and we’d like to find out. That’s all.” He sat back heavily, sighing as he went. “Even so, I mean it when I say this: You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”

  “Do what?”

  “Talk to him.”

  “It sounds like you’re insisting.”

  “I don’t mean to. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to know what happened, but at the same time I know what we’re asking. Else”—and now Teddy wasn’t watching her as he spoke—“he’s gone loopy, and I’m not sure if it’s safe for you to be around him. We told him that we’d come and talk to you, and we’re doing that now, but we didn’t promise him that you’d come, and you don’t have to. It’s your decision—it really is—and if you don’t want to go, that’s understandable.”

  Yes, it would be, and yes, it was her decision, but in the pause that followed Elisabeth knew what she would do. Of course she would visit Alfred. Already, she knew that there was no sensible explanation for what he had done—no good reason, no cause—but she had to hear what Alfred would say, however deranged it might be. She had already lost one person without any closure whatsoever; she wouldn’t lose Mack like that, too. Elisabeth turned her head and looked at the window again. The trees seemed even closer now, as if they were inching forward every minute, consuming her, engulfing her.

  “All right,” Elisabeth said, and she looked at Teddy. Then she pushed her chair away from the table.

  CHAPTER 7

  You never knew your mother, but you know your vision of her as well as you know any real person. When you close your eyes at night and wait for sleep, you can see her smile. You can hear her laugh. You can smell her perfume, and you can feel her touch on your face, her fingers running through your hair. You’ve thought of these things so often, and so vividly, that they might as well be real. To you, they are real.

  You have entire fantasies about her. Nothing heroic. Nothing larger-than-life. You fantasize about the mundane, because the mundane is easier to believe. You have a fantasy of going grocery shopping with her. In another, you visit the beach in Maryland, chitchat with a woman your mother happens to know from high school. You have fantasies of her taking your temperature. Walking with you to school. Reading books to you at bedtime.

  But these are only dreams. The more often you dream them, the clearer they become, but they’re all make-believe. In real life, your mother died from chest cancer when you and your sister were four years old. In real life, it’s only you and Jacqueline and Papa. That’s the way it is, and that’s the way it always will be.

  “I’m not raising children,” Papa’s told you. “This family has no time for children.”

  He treats you and your sister like adults. You have been taught—trained—to think of yourself, Jacqueline, and your father as a team. You and your sister maintain the house, cooking and cleaning and ironing and doing all the things grown women do. You’ve known how to make schnitzel and potpie since you were six, and you’ve known how to sew since you were five.

  Not only that: You help with your father’s business, too. He’s the best tool and die maker in Lititz, and you and Jacqueline help him run his shop. You fetch for him. You run errands. You return tools to their places on the wall. You sweep filings off the floor. You oil the machinery, the punches and plates and spools and springs. You manage his appointments, and you maintain a careful ledger of the orders that come from them. He even lets you manage the payments and receipts, though your father delegates this task to you and you alone.

  “You’re the favorite,” Jacqueline has said more than once. “You’re the favorite, and I’m number two. I’m number poo.”

  You roll your eyes. Sigh at her. You tell her, “No, no, no. I’m good at arithmetic. That’s all. Papa loves us just the same. We’re a team, remember? And every member of a team is just as important as the next.”

  But, really, you are the favorite child, and both of you know it. Jacqueline wants your comfort, which you’re happy to give, but the truth is that Papa acts sweeter and kinder and more patient with you, and he trusts you more, too.

  “You got all your mama’s good sense,” Aunt Ethel once told you, “and you didn’t leave any for Jacqueline.”

  Your sister talks back. She glowers. She scowls. She lies. She acts out, as your auntie puts it. Once, she tried to shoot an apple off Cousin Charlie’s head with a Daisy BB gun, and she nicked a chunk of flesh off the top of his ear. Another time, she got mad at Papa during dinner, and instead of cleaning up like normal, she hurled the dishes through the open kitchen window, shattering a dozen pieces of china. She cusses, she sings in the bathtub, she sasses your teacher at school, she slaps girls in the mouth when they’re cruel to her and kicks boys in the crotch when they bully her. Once, you and Jacqueline and Jesse Rhiner were messing around in the woods, and Jacqueline stomped on a dead opossum and sprayed its rotten guts all over Jesse’s legs. That’s the kind of thing she does.

  And your father’s patience goes only so far. He may treat you like a grown-up. He doesn’t check your homework or force you to bed. He trusts you with the shopping and going to town. But your sister toes the line, and he can’t let her go completely unpunished, not always. Sometimes, he grounds her. Other times, he gives her more chores.

  “He treats us like his servants,” Jacqueline has huffed. “His personal maids.”

  “No, he doesn’t.”

  “If Mama were here, she wouldn’t let him treat us like this.”

  She says that a lot. “If Mama were here.” For you, your mother is a vision. Your imaginary paradise. But for Jacqueline, your mother is her defense. She’s a make-believe avenger.

  “With Mama,” she says, “our lives wouldn’t be like this. She’d put Papa in his place, and we wouldn’t be prisoners.”

  “We’re not prisoners now,” you say.

  But Jacqueline doesn’t hear you.

  Your sister will never admit how lucky she is. Papa ne
ver hits her, not even when she screams in his face or throws dishes out the window. His papa used to beat him senseless, and he says that he has no wish to do anything like that to his own children. He’s huge—six foot something and about as wide as a doorway—but he’s gentle and calm. The worst he ever does is sass your sister back.

  “I’m going to call the police on you,” she threatened him once, “and tell them about that whisky bottle in your bedroom.”

  “Go ahead,” he told her. “After talking with you, they’ll probably want a drink, too.”

  “I wish I could just vanish,” she told him another time. “I wish someone would kidnap me.”

  “Once they get to know you,” Papa said, “they’d bring you right back.”

  She deserves every bit of sass he gives her. Or almost every bit. Sometimes, especially when he drinks from that bedroom bottle, he says things that make you hold your breath, things that twist your heart even though they’re not aimed at you.

  “Goddamn it, Jacky,” he said the night she took off part of Cousin Charlie’s ear. “You could have shot his eye out.”

  “We were playing,” she protested. “I didn’t—”

  “You didn’t what?” he snapped. “You didn’t think. You didn’t think because you’re stupid. Do you understand that, Jacky?”

  But your sister was silent.

  “Then I’ll repeat it,” your father said. “You’re stupid. You’re a stupid little girl who doesn’t think. You’re a dumb disappointment.”

  And later that evening, after your sister went to bed crying, your father said something more.

  “Else,” he told you, and from his seat at the kitchen table he reached for your hand. “You’re the good one,” he said. “Don’t ever think otherwise.”

  You stared at him, and you couldn’t think of anything to say. But he didn’t want you to say anything. His hand dropped weakly from yours, and he turned away.

  You know he shouldn’t say such things, but you also know this: A lot of people would agree with him. You and Jacqueline are twins, two of a kind, and people think of you as a set. And when they think of you together, they think of you as the better half. The kind one. The polite one. The good one.

  But they don’t understand what you do: Jacqueline isn’t bad—she’s fun. Despite her sass and scowls and short temper, you wouldn’t want her any other way. Her mischief makes your life worth living. She’s adventurous. She’s brave. She’s exciting. The good one? Your papa has it backward. In truth, you wish that you could be more like Jacqueline and less like yourself.

  But at least you can tag along. You may not be her, but you can be with her. You love your sister, and she loves you. Your mother may be dead and one day Papa will be, too, but you’ll always have Jacqueline, and the simple knowledge of that is enough to comfort you when you’re scared, to make you happy when you’re sad.

  “We’re the real team,” Jacqueline has told you. “Not the three of us. The two of us. Me and you.”

  Maybe she’s right. You were born into this world together, and you’ve been together ever since. That’s all that’s ever mattered. That’s all that ever will.

  So you play along. When Jacqueline unfolds your map, you kneel above it with her, and your fingers trace in unison over the roads of New York, Ohio, Nebraska, California.

  “Where should we go?” she’ll ask. “Where will we be happy?”

  We’re happy now would be your real answer.

  But instead you smile, and you fantasize. You point to a destination, and you dream.

  CHAPTER 8

  Although all the meat had been removed at the start of summer, the cache still smelled like cooking rawhide, a scent so powerful that it made Elisabeth’s eyes water when she first stepped inside. The open door cast a wide blue block across the middle of the floor, but other than this, the cache was dimly lit. It was humid inside, as cool and dank as a cave.

  Alfred sat in a chair against the back wall. His arms and legs were bound to his seat with thick winds of rope. The block of light slipping through the door didn’t quite reach his legs, so he sat in relative darkness. Still, Elisabeth could see him well enough. His eyes were wide and sallow. His face was covered in a scrim of peppery stubble.

  And his clothes—Elisabeth felt sick just looking at them. His shirt was stained with spatters of blood, and in certain places the fabric hung more loosely, wet, as if someone with dyed red fingertips had pinched him there. She could see blood even on his pants, and on the tips of his boots. In a flash, she imagined it as clear as a strip of film: Alfred beating Mack with the hook wrench; Alfred stomping on his face, his head, his throat. Her knees felt weak, but Alfred looked calm. He stared straight at her. He was very still.

  “I’ll be right here, Mrs. Pfautz,” Henry said. He was standing behind her. “I’ll be here the whole time.”

  “No,” Alfred said. “You’ll have to wait outside. I want to speak to Mrs. Pfautz alone.”

  Henry stepped forward. “I’m staying here. I’m guarding you.”

  Alfred glanced down at himself, exasperated. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “I can’t move.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Henry told him. “It’s for Mrs. Pfautz’s safety.”

  His insistence seemed fair enough. Alfred was a killer, and who could tell what else he might be capable of? But in spite of that, Elisabeth wasn’t afraid of him. It wasn’t the ropes that bound him or the shotgun that hung by Henry’s side. Elisabeth’s fearlessness came from that brief exchange she and Alfred had shared on the landing strip: I’m always comfortable with my countrymen, he had told her. In Alfred’s mind, Elisabeth was his ally. She was his attorney behind closed doors. She could only guess what he might do in different circumstances, but Alfred wouldn’t hurt her today, not here.

  And besides, she wanted the truth. The uncensored, candid truth. That was what she had come for, and she wouldn’t get it with Henry here.

  “It’s all right,” Elisabeth said. “I can be alone with him. It’s okay.”

  “It’s not okay,” Henry said, “not with me. I’m looking after you, Mrs. Pfautz.”

  Elisabeth chewed at the inside of her bottom lip, thinking.

  “How about this?” she said. “Stand outside. Leave the door open, I mean, and you can watch us the entire time.” She glanced at Alfred, surprised to find that, of all things, she was seeking his approval.

  “Yes,” Alfred said. “Stand outside. That would be fine.”

  “Mrs. Pfautz—”

  “It really is okay,” Elisabeth said, and she tried to sound as self-assured as she could. Her teacher’s voice. “Trust me.”

  Henry watched her for a second. Then, sighing, he lowered his head and turned to leave. The cache rested on four stilts that raised it ten feet off the ground, far from the reach of bears and wolverines. Its steps were wide and steep, not so much steps as rungs of a ladder. Slowly, Henry climbed to the ground and paced away. He stopped about fifteen feet from the cache and turned to face them.

  “A little farther,” Alfred said, pointing with his chin.

  Henry rolled his eyes. He walked a few feet more, then set his boots firmly in place. They sank in the grassy mud. “This is as far as I’m going,” he told them.

  “Fine,” Alfred said. “That’s fine,” and, a little wearily, he turned his eyes up to Elisabeth.

  They were quiet. Elisabeth stood to Alfred’s left, five or six feet away from him.

  “Thank you for seeing me,” he said. “I appreciate—”

  She spat in his face. Alfred flinched, turning his head, closing his eyes, and in that flinch Elisabeth felt something terrible and true.

  “Elisabeth—”

  She stepped forward, and she spat on him again, even fiercer this time. She was shaking. Balled into fists, her fingers ached. Everything ached.

&nb
sp; “Will you let me speak?” Alfred said. And then, gravely, “I have something to tell you.”

  And admittedly, she wanted to hear it. Taut with fury and grief, she turned away from him, and she made herself breathe. She studied the walls of the cache. They were built from aspen logs, and the spaces between the wood glowed with narrow bands of twilight. Dust was swirling through the air and, cast against the walls’ glowing backdrop, it looked as if the cache were filled with undulating flames.

  “Elisabeth?”

  She breathed.

  “Elisabeth. Please listen to me.”

  “You have one minute,” she said, facing him again. “You have one minute to tell me about what happened.”

  When she said that, her stomach felt suddenly light, tingling as if she might get sick. She thought of Mack. What happened, she had said, and it sounded so innocuous, so small. But it wasn’t, and as Elisabeth listened to herself talk, she felt again that she was stuck between waking and sleep, stuck in some limbo that wasn’t quite real but wasn’t quite a dream. She felt dizzy, but she did her best to seem calm. If she looked at all unnerved, Alfred didn’t seem to notice.

  “I think you’re mistaken about something,” he said. “This isn’t about Mack.”

  “I came here to talk about Mack,” Elisabeth said, “and if that’s not the topic, then I’m not going to stay.”

  Now Alfred smiled, though it wasn’t malicious. It was a bashful smile, almost coy. “You’ll want to stay for this,” he said. “I promise you.”

  “Tell me why you did it.”

  Alfred sat straighter. “Cards. An argument. Didn’t Teddy and the boy tell you?”

  “They told me you’re lying.”

  “They would think that, wouldn’t they?”

  “Are you?”

  Alfred watched her. “Do you think I’m lying? Tell me the truth, because that’s what this is all about: you and me getting to know each other. Just a little. Today is our first step toward the truth, so tell me what you’re thinking.”