How Quickly She Disappears

by Raymond Fleischmann

And that was true, or close to the truth. She was testing him. Feeling him out. But she did want to move forward. Despite it all, she truly did. There was a night not long ago when she had lain awake in bed and contemplated her recklessness in corresponding with Alfred. The man had tried to kill her, and yet she still pursued him, and she knew that their relationship wasn’t over. There was something suicidal about her behavior, about her willingness to carry on with Alfred, not only in the way that she toyed with her own destruction but also in the compulsion that drove her to do so. She couldn’t quit, no matter the risk. She was sick. Deranged. But in acknowledging her sickness she had come to accept it and, perhaps, to embrace it. Alfred was right: She wanted to visit him. In a way, there was nothing she wanted more.

  “And this third thing,” she said, “what happens if I decline? Let’s say I don’t want to give you what you want.”

  “Then you don’t have to give it. You can turn and walk away.”

  “And you’ll shrug it off? You won’t care in the least?”

  “Of course I’ll care, but your decisions are your own.”

  “You’re not answering the heart of what I’m asking you.”

  “Then ask it more directly.”

  She sucked on the cigarette. Smoke stung her eyes. “If I say no to whatever it is you want, will you kill me?”

  A pause. Contemplation as thick as the smoke hanging in the air.

  “No,” Alfred told her, “but you’ll never see your sister again,” and he hung up the phone.

  CHAPTER 31

  She stood, crossed the room, and lay down on the floor. And she lay there for a long while, smoking cigarettes and thinking. The radio played idly, and slowly Elisabeth came to listen to it. A familiar song was playing—Cliff Edwards’ “I’ll See You in My Dreams.”

  Lonely days are long.

  Twilight sings a song

  Of the happiness that used to be.

  Soon my eyes will close.

  And I’ll find repose.

  And in dreams you’re always near to me.

  “I love you, Else. You know that, don’t you?”

  She was hearing John’s voice, and then she was hearing her own, watching her younger self nod in sleepy contentment.

  “Yes,” she said. “I know that. And I love you, too.”

  March 1930. A few months before their marriage. A year and a half before Margaret was born. She and John were seated beside each other on the tumbledown love seat that he and his roommate owned. A record was playing. Cliff Edwards. The very same song.

  I’ll see you in my dreams.

  Hold you in my dreams.

  Someone took you out of my arms.

  Still I feel the thrill of your charms.

  And she really had loved him. He was funny, sweet, sympathetic. He was kind to his mother. He was happy around children. When he smiled, his ears wiggled and rose, a thing she found deeply endearing. And God, was he smart. Not counting English, John spoke three languages—German, French, and Italian—and he was working on a fourth, Mandarin, of all things. He wanted to express himself, he had told her, and it took more than one language for him to feel adequately expressive. He wrote poetry back then—of course he did—and she was a sucker for it.

  But that night another man was showing himself. Not some diffident poet but a man more presumptuous. They kissed. Her hand was on his knee. They kissed and kissed.

  “Touch it,” he said, their lips finally parting. He took her hand, shifted it from his knee to his lap. “Feel me, Else. Touch it.”

  “Touch it,” Jacqueline told her. They were lying together in Jacqueline’s bed, and their pajama bottoms were pulled down around their thighs. It was summer 1920, a year before she disappeared. “Touch me,” Jacqueline said, and she took Elisabeth’s hand and moved it to her wanting. “It’s all right. We’re the same. We’re twins.” Jacqueline closed her eyes. “It feels nice.”

  Yes, it did. It felt like nothing Elisabeth had experienced until then and nothing she had experienced since. To this day, she didn’t regret it. She felt no shame. After all, they were only children, but there was also truth in what Jacqueline had told her. Their bodies felt different, but not much different. They were the same, and for that reason Elisabeth had not been afraid to do what she had done, and she wasn’t afraid to think of it now.

  “Am I afraid of it?” Mack said. “No, not in the least.”

  They were sitting on either side of Mack’s table, the stove pulsing warmth beside them. Margaret was sleeping in an armchair across the room. She and Elisabeth had visited Mack to have dinner and learn about machinery. Gears. Mechanisms. The movement of many-jointed parts. But now Elisabeth and Mack were speaking in whispers, and they were talking about death.

  “Why should I be afraid of it?” Mack said, smiling faintly.

  They were drinking whisky. The Athabaskans in Tanacross drank—that was no secret—but they did it almost exclusively in private. Mack and Elisabeth were like family, and the whisky they shared that night was an unspoken but unmistakable indication of this. Elisabeth tossed the last of hers back, wincing a little. It was December, but the whisky and the stove made her feel as warm as if it were the midst of summer.

  “What if you go to hell?” Elisabeth said, grinning. “What if God smites you because of your wicked ways?” She tapped her empty glass. “Your indulgences?”

  “If hell’s full of whisky drinkers,” Mack said, “it’ll be a fine place indeed.”

  And then, perfectly naturally, he reached across the table and took her hand. She didn’t balk at it. His hand was thick and warm, a hand brailled with calluses that belied the gentleness of its grip and the tenderness of his intent. Elisabeth smiled, and she held him, and she felt more at peace in that moment than she had in many years. But her cheeks did flush. She bowed her head.

  “And what about you?” Mack said. “You afraid of dying?”

  “No,” Elisabeth told him. She thought for a little bit. “I’m scared of what it might feel like. I’m scared of it like I was scared of childbirth. But in itself?” She looked up at him now. “No, I guess I’m not.”

  “Why not?”

  She shrugged. Smiled mischievously. “Well, hopefully,” she said, “you’ll be dead long before me, so at least I’ll have you waiting for me in the afterlife.”

  “With open arms,” Mack said, and he winked, lifting his glass with his free hand.

  She should have kissed him then. It was what she had wanted to do, and there was no doubt in her mind that Mack would have kissed her back. But she didn’t. She wasn’t brave enough. And as she came back to the present, the air thick with fetid cigarette smoke, she heard Cliff Edwards still crooning through her living room.

  Lips that once were mine.

  Tender eyes that shine.

  They will light my way tonight.

  I’ll see you in my dreams.

  Her eyes stung with tears, and it seemed to her then—as it had many times before—that her whole life was a series of lost loves. Maybe that was everyone’s life. Love was often like that: the wrong moments embraced, the right moments rebuffed or all too fleeting. Yet there was nothing she could do but keep going, keep striving, and convince herself that she wouldn’t let another opportunity pass her by.

  “Just keep running,” Elisabeth whispered, if only to hear her own voice. She stared up at the ceiling. “Just keep running.” And then she pushed herself up.

  That afternoon, the prison’s visitation room was positively frigid. It had been drafty before, but now the air seemed to pass through the walls as if they were sieves, and the sweet smell of winter hung wetly in Elisabeth’s nose. She kept her parka on, and she held her hands firmly in her pockets.

  The wait was even longer than before; thirty minutes passed without explanation. She would have been war
mer had she stood up and paced, but she preferred sitting down. She felt safer that way—impervious as a rock in her sedentariness. Elisabeth sat there, and she studied the names and initials and dates that scored every inch of the table in front of her. She hadn’t paid the etchings much mind before, but now she lost herself in them, following their bends and curves as if studying a vast, meandering maze—trying to find her way out. Near the center of the table, someone had carved Relax: You’ll be dead soon. Somehow, it made her smile.

  “What’s funny?”

  She looked up. Alfred was standing in the open doorway. Behind him, a guard nodded at Elisabeth—the same mouse of a man who had taken Alfred to dinner months before—and then he left the room, shutting the door behind him, closing them in. Elisabeth didn’t move. Alfred walked forward.

  “You were smiling a moment ago,” he said. “Tell me what’s funny.” And then, so stiff that it sounded slightly sweet, “I’d like to smile, too.”

  “Relax,” Elisabeth said. “You’ll be dead soon.”

  Alfred recoiled. “What?”

  “It’s carved into the table.” She let herself glance away from him for a second, pointing with her eyes at the carving.

  Alfred walked to the other side of the table, scanning its runes as he went. Then he saw it—she could tell from the way that his eyes settled and focused—but he didn’t smile. He gave a little shrug.

  “Well, I guess that’s true,” he said. He pulled out a chair and sat down. “Not especially amusing, but true.”

  They were silent. They watched each other. Then Elisabeth raised her chin. “Are you afraid of dying?”

  Alfred considered the question for a few seconds, and then he answered firmly, “Yes.”

  She hadn’t expected that. “Why?”

  “Because I don’t believe in God, and I don’t believe in the afterlife. This is all we’ve got”—he held up his arms—“and for that reason I’m afraid to lose it.”

  “That’s exactly why I’m not afraid to lose it,” Elisabeth said. “If there’s nothing after this life, why be afraid? You won’t know you’ve lost it at all.”

  “That’s true,” Alfred said. “I’m not suggesting it’s rational. It’s instinctive. It’s just how I feel.”

  “So, in the war, when you woke up in the wreckage, you were afraid of dying?”

  “Of course,” Alfred said. “I woke up crying, I was so scared.”

  “I can’t imagine you crying.”

  “I don’t do it very often. I’m like you.”

  Elisabeth stared him down. “How do you mean?”

  “Well, you don’t cry very much, do you?”

  “No.”

  “And when you do cry, you cry alone, in all but the most extreme circumstances. Because being alone is the only time you feel comfortable enough to do it. Isn’t that right?”

  “I suppose it is,” and she couldn’t help but feel impressed by the accuracy of his assumption—impressed, and vaguely unsettled.

  Now Alfred crossed one leg over the other, leaning back, getting comfortable. “Why do you think that is?” he said. “Why do you hold back when you’re around other people?”

  Because it feels too intimate, she could have told him, more intimate than anything, even sex, and I have no one I feel intimate with, but she bit her tongue.

  “It’s just something I never did much growing up,” she said. “We were taught to keep a stiff upper lip. My family wasn’t very emotional.”

  “Your father, you mean. Your mother—she died when you were very young, correct?”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Lititz is a small town,” Alfred said, “and you were something of a celebrity, weren’t you?”

  That she was, and in the worst way possible. As a child, she had been the town’s sob story. The little girl for whom tragedy never ended. First, her mother, when she and Jacqueline were only four years old. Cancer of the chest. Two beautiful girls left behind by the most important person in their lives. Imagine the heartbreak. The outpouring of sympathies. Elisabeth didn’t recall much from that year, but she remembered the food. The town must have fed them for a year straight, because who wouldn’t want to feed this stricken family? This man and his two darling daughters. Motherless. Abandoned.

  And it didn’t end there. Six years later, Jacqueline disappeared, and dear God, what attention that had brought. Newspaper articles. Reports on the radio. Every telephone pole in Lititz plastered with pictures of Jacqueline’s face, and with that Elisabeth’s face, too. For years, people would see her in town and report the sighting to the police, believing she was her sister. The agony of losing Jacqueline was endless, and the food was, too. A continuous parade of optimists and well-wishers came to the door, and this time Elisabeth remembered their gifts vividly—sauerbraten and schnitzels and tray upon tray of dessert. To this day, she hated shoofly pie, not for how much of it she ate but for how ubiquitous it had been in her kitchen, and how little she had desired to taste it.

  Then, the final coffin nail: Just three years after Jacqueline, she lost her father to the bottle. Viral hepatitis, ostensibly, but she and everyone else in town knew the truth of what caused his body to fail him. And they knew the sad reality of Elisabeth’s young life: Her whole family was dead and gone by the time she was fourteen years old. At that point, the well-wishers only shook their heads from afar, but Elisabeth still saw the pity in their eyes, and she suffered through their fortified, reassuring smiles. Quiet: Here comes the Metzger girl. You know about her, don’t you? Yes, Lititz was a small town, and for a time she had been the most pitied girl in Lancaster County.

  “You could say that,” Elisabeth told Alfred. “There were certainly many people who felt sorry for me.”

  “And how did that make you feel? Did the attention comfort you?”

  “No. I hated the attention.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I hated people feeling sorry for me.”

  “But why?”

  She thought about that. “I suppose—” she said, still working through it. “I suppose because pity seems presumptuous to me.”

  “How so?”

  “People didn’t trust that I could manage my grief on my own. It felt like they thought I needed their help, as if their feeling sorry for me would help me cope.” She reached out, traced one finger along a pair of initials. L. W. “It didn’t. Being pitied made me feel worse. I felt patronized.”

  Alfred nodded. “I understand completely. And I’d add one other thing about pity: It’s self-centered. Pity is the kind way of phrasing what those people felt for you, but the truth of what they felt was envy.”

  “Envy?”

  Another nod, slow and thoughtful. “We claim to pity people like you—people, especially children, whose lives are filled with tragedy—but deep inside we’re also envious. Tragedy is a spectacle, isn’t it? It draws attention to the victim, and all humans desire attention and envy those who have it.” He turned his head and looked up at the window. “I’m speaking from experience, of course.”

  “Your brother.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What was his name?”

  The briefest pause. “Heinrich.”

  “And you say he died when you were six years old?”

  “Correct.”

  “Must have been hard,” Elisabeth said, sucking at her teeth, “but I bet you got a lot of free food out of it, at least.”

  Alfred laughed, and the echoing boisterousness of it was enough to make Elisabeth smile.

  “From our neighbors, you mean?” Alfred said. “Yes, that’s true. They had to do something for us, so they cooked and cooked.” He was still chuckling. “I was fat for years thanks to my dead brother.”

  “I never ate a bite of anything anyone gave us.”

  “What a missed oppo
rtunity,” Alfred said. “The people of Lititz know their way around a kitchen. That reminds me.” He angled to the side now, reaching for a pocket, and then he set a folded piece of paper on the table. “I have something for you.”

  “Is this about my sister?” Elisabeth said. “Or our—”

  “Can we just relax for a minute longer?” Alfred asked. “Can we be friends again, just for a little while?”

  We were never friends. But again she bit her tongue, not only to avoid confrontation, but also because she wanted to see what Alfred was giving her. She couldn’t resist.

  “It’s a gift for you,” Alfred said. “It’s not the gift. This is outside of our exchange. But it’s something I wanted to give you.” He tapped it two quick times. Tup. Tup. “Open it.”

  She expected half a dozen different things. Another letter. A threat. An impassioned love note. A single cryptic word designed to peck at her. But as Elisabeth unfolded the paper, she saw that Alfred had offered her a drawing: jumbled lines of dark ink that stared through the backside of the paper like a thousand inverted shadows. With each fold she undid, the picture came more into order, and soon she was looking at an illustration of downtown Lititz, Pennsylvania.

  It was like a photograph. The fork of Main Street, the row of brick homes on the corner of Broad Street, the molded columns of Lititz Springs Bank, everything rendered in perfect detail. Elisabeth couldn’t help but smile.

  “You drew this?”

  Alfred nodded, not proudly, but not entirely modestly either.

  “I didn’t know you could draw like this.”

  “Why would you?”

  “Well,” Elisabeth said, “still. It’s surprising. That’s all.” She stared at the illustration. Even the leaves in the trees were finely detailed, each with its own network of veins, lines so thin that they were nearly invisible. The streets were free of people, but somehow Lititz looked thriving and full of life. “It’s wonderful,” Elisabeth said, and it was.

  “Thank you.”

  They were quiet.

  “How long did this take?”