How Quickly She Disappears

by Raymond Fleischmann

  But this initial paralysis was only temporary, and then the full reality of what had happened overtook her. From the courtyard, someone dragged her inside, and as she was lying in a heap on the floor of the visitation room, Elisabeth felt everything that had been suppressed in her immediate reaction.

  She was sobbing. She was utterly destroyed. She still couldn’t stand, but this wasn’t for lack of strength in her limbs. Elisabeth wanted to lie there forever, curled up on the floor in ruin, and when she started clawing at her own face like her fever-stricken sister had done so many years before, the young guard and a team of other men restrained her. Sometime after that, two fingers were in her mouth, and a hand was shoving sedatives down her throat.

  Wear and tear, the elements, and months of Alfred’s own digging. Like a wolverine tunneling into a meat cache, Alfred had burrowed through the wall—a hoard of abraded forks and spoons were found behind the radiator in his cell—but he had needed Margaret to crawl through it. With her on the other side, Alfred had tossed Margaret an improvised rope: a line of knotted bedsheets, undershirts, and men’s briefs that he had hidden within the embankment of snow, ready for use at a moment’s notice. Margaret secured the line to a cast-iron gas pipe, and Alfred climbed up and over. The yard’s withering barbed wire wasn’t much of an obstacle, it seemed. After untying the rope from the pipe, Alfred and Margaret made their way to the pair of twelve-foot perimeter fences, which they scaled. Here, the barbs were sharper and new, fresh as springtime thistles, but Alfred unknotted his rope and draped the bedsheets and shirts over the wires for protection. They jogged to the road, and beyond there their footprints vanished. The whole thing took fifteen minutes. Twenty at the most.

  The guards and the police took entire hours to figure out these details, and Elisabeth never heard this narrative directly. From a distance, she picked it up disjointedly, fading in and out, the hours slipping forward in fits and starts. They had her lying on a cot in the lobby, but she could hear voices and other sounds all around her. The chatter of police. Telephones ringing. A straight key’s relentless tapping. The whirring drone of sirens as the prison locked down. A guard reporting the news over a radio. John’s voice, distant and somber. Footsteps, thousands of footsteps, some hurried, others relaxed. She heard facts and times being reported and repeated ad nauseam, and frequently she heard voices talking about her.

  “No, I think he’s a friend of her family,” one person said.

  “Is she drunk?” another asked.

  The drugs like fog in her veins, these voices came to her as rumbling echoes. She heard the world as if from underwater, and she thought of the drawing she had done for Alfred in September. Her self-portrait. She’s drowning, Alfred had written, and as Elisabeth thought of that now, she started laughing, softly at first, but soon she was twisting and rolling with roaring convulsions. She laughed so hard that the muscles in her stomach felt as if they were tearing apart, her whole body rending itself to pieces.

  “Else,” came John’s voice. But she just kept laughing. Then, louder, “Else!” and he slapped her across the face, waited a second, and then slapped her again. On a dime, she stopped laughing, and she stared up at him earnestly.

  “I heard you the first time.”

  Sam York was not among them, but a group of police officers was gathered around the cot, and they wanted to speak with her. As best she could, Elisabeth answered their questions about Alfred, their meetings, their letters, the “exchange,” Margaret, everything. She was past the point of feeling self-conscious. She remembered how she had once felt in York’s office. Foolish. Like a child revealing some bit of mischief.

  But today, she felt none of that. The sedatives’ edge was already wearing off, and in its place was a new kind of numbness, one of her soul instead of her body. She felt dead inside, as if her core had rotted into wasted nothingness, and she answered the policemen’s questions with unflinching sobriety.

  “We’ve been having trouble at home. She tried to run away just this week.”

  “You could say that, yes.”

  “They had met only once before.”

  “That’s what Margaret told me. I never heard him say it. But I believe her that he said it.”

  “Four times previously. This was the fifth, and the first time that Margaret had come with me.”

  “Talking mostly. Once, we drew pictures.”

  “No, I never noticed anything.”

  “No, he never mentioned it.”

  “No, I had no idea.”

  “No. If I had, I wouldn’t have done it.”

  “About four foot six. Ninety pounds. Maybe less.”

  “Blond.”

  “Hazel.”

  “Joyce.”

  “Not that I’m aware of. She’s never even broken a bone.”

  “You’d have to ask her teacher that. Catherine Curry. At the base.”

  In all the hours of questioning, Elisabeth never lost her composure. She had nothing more to lose. She was broken, and it wasn’t just the sedatives. She listened to the questions, and she heard herself answer, but she knew there was no need for this. They wouldn’t find Alfred, not if he didn’t want them to. She had known that from the moment she lifted the courtyard door and saw that empty expanse of snow. If she had thought there was the slightest chance of catching up to them, she would have turned on her heels and sprinted out of the prison like a dog on the hunt. But she had known instantly that Alfred and Margaret were already out of reach.

  Her daughter was gone. Carried off by a maniac. And to what end, she didn’t yet understand. Stubbornly, the police were certain of themselves. “He needed her to bust out—that’s all,” they said. “She’ll only slow him down, and if he really thinks of her like a daughter, he’ll just let her go. He won’t hurt her.” Patrol cars were already combing the streets, and they expected to find Margaret at any moment.

  Elisabeth had heard lines like that before: ignorance dressed as comfort, conceit disguised as conviction. Everything is all right, ma’am. The situation is under control. They didn’t know what they were talking about. They had expected to find Jacqueline, too, and what good had that done? They had thought—

  But Margaret wasn’t Jacqueline. She needed to remember that. Margaret was smarter. Older. More resilient. The police were useless, but that didn’t mean all hope was lost. What had happened, and why? Concentrate on that. Alfred had needed Margaret’s assistance, but he had needed her for something else, too. There was some other design here, something Elisabeth could only guess about. What she knew was this: There was no evidence of a struggle in the courtyard, nothing in the footprints that might suggest Margaret had been in any kind of duress. She had gone with him willingly, then. She had bought some story he had sold her, just as Elisabeth had done. He had lured her.

  Elisabeth’s mind flitted from the banal to the horrific. Perhaps Alfred wanted Margaret’s company and nothing more. Perhaps he really did love her like a daughter and wouldn’t harm her in the least. Or perhaps he was raping her this very minute. Perhaps he’d torture her. Perhaps he’d kill her. Or—and the sensibility of this was terrifying—perhaps Alfred would get in touch with the man who had taken Jacqueline. Perhaps he’d offer him a new bride.

  This was what she had done to her own daughter, or what she might have done. It seemed insane to her now—the gamble she had made with Margaret’s life. But she really had done it, and now this was it. Her new reality. This is your life, she kept thinking. This is the life you’ve made. A fate worse than death. A thousand times worse.

  But in all her dry despair, Elisabeth tried to think about one thing above all else: the knife. Mack’s hunting knife. Perhaps there was some hope left, and for that reason the knife was the only thing that Elisabeth didn’t reveal to the police. In some strange way, she felt the need to protect that detail, as if revealing it to anyone else would somehow dilute what litt
le hope it offered.

  Yes, the knife. Think of the knife. She had to trust in Margaret. They wouldn’t catch Alfred, but perhaps they wouldn’t need to. Perhaps Margaret could solve this situation herself. She imagined Alfred by the side of the road, his throat yawning open like a wide, red grin. Think of that, she told herself. The possibilities. The potential. The knife.

  “What else could have possibly happened?” John asked.

  They were driving home. What else could they do? We’ll phone the second we learn anything, one officer had promised, and then he had added, with unintended foreboding, This will all be over soon. Now it was almost ten o’clock at night, and this was the first time that John and Elisabeth had been alone all day.

  “That’s the only thing I’d like to know,” he added. “What did you think would happen, Else? Give me the bottom line. How did you think this would end?”

  Her seat was at an incline. She was staring out the window. Streetlights flickered across her face. Her voice was very soft. “I thought he’d take me to my sister.”

  John sighed. “Then you’re even stupider than I thought.”

  He had to help her inside the house. Her mind was almost clear again, but her body still felt heavy and strange, as if her limbs belonged to another person. She hooked one arm around John’s shoulders, and he limped with her to an armchair in the living room. After she sat, Elisabeth closed her eyes, but she could feel him still towering over her, watching. Then, he set something on the telephone stand beside the chair, and when she opened her eyes she saw that it was a dark brown bottle of pills.

  “The doctor gave me those,” John said. “They’re sedatives, and I was told they’re very strong.” He hadn’t bothered turning on the light, and his face was painted in shadow. He stared at her with eyes as black as the empty night sky. “The doctor said you shouldn’t take more than one every six hours.” He paused, and in that quiet he said everything else he needed to. “There are twenty-four of them in that bottle.”

  Then he left her, and she heard the bedroom door shut a while later. Elisabeth reached for the bottle, unscrewed the cap, shook out six pills. And she studied them for a time, six oblong capsules, yellowish white, like tiny sticks of butter. Her palm sweated against them, and their gelatin shells stuck to her.

  She didn’t resent John. She truly didn’t. If anything, she sympathized with him. As much as he hated her right now, she hated herself even more. Their marriage was over, and if all the worst things came to bear on Margaret, Elisabeth’s life would be over, too. She would see to that, and John knew this as well as she did. Could she really blame him, then? No. If he was guilty of anything, it was assuming that the worst had already happened to Margaret, and he had taken that assumption to its natural consequence.

  But the knife. The knife, the knife, the knife. That was enough to keep Elisabeth going. Tonight was not the night. Not until she found out more about Margaret. She turned her hand over, and she watched as the capsules gradually snapped away from her skin, until at last only one stubborn pill remained. Then she clapped her hand against her mouth, swallowed the single pill, and tried to relax, closing her eyes once more, waiting for a sleep that she doubted would ever come.

  * * *

  —

  But it did: a sweeping, thick sleep that enveloped her like rising water, and she was with her sister again.

  It was winter but it wasn’t. She and Jacqueline were standing on the ice of a frozen lake, but all around them the trees were blooming, rich with flowers and fruit. There were peach trees, pear trees, cherry trees, and apple trees, all of their branches fantastically long, reaching across the lake in a colorful embrace. She and Jacqueline stood near the center of the lake, but in the strange illogic of the dream, the branches hung only inches from their heads. Motionless, arms at her sides, Elisabeth watched her sister picking fruit.

  “Margaret is so sad,” Jacqueline said, her fingers working at a branch that dangled above her. “She’s dreadfully sad.”

  Jacqueline was dressed in summer clothes—an off-white dress with a line of sunflowers stitched around the skirt—and she was barefoot. Elisabeth was, too. Against the soles of her feet she could feel the bite of the ice, a chill so cold that it felt like just the opposite, not the pinch of cold but the sting of heat.

  “It’s awful to see her like that,” Jacqueline said, still balanced on her toes, picking through the branch. “Margaret’s so sad, and do you even know why?”

  Though the air felt warm and the trees were in bloom, clouds of frosty condensation trailed from Elisabeth’s nose and lips as she breathed. She opened her mouth to speak, staring at her sister through a fog of icy vapor, but Jacqueline cut her off before she could begin.

  “She’s sad because she’s waiting for you. She’s frightened, and you’re not coming to her.” Reaching up a little higher, Jacqueline plucked a piece of fruit from the tree. Then she turned and, finally, faced Elisabeth. “I know how Margaret feels,” Jacqueline said, “because you haven’t come for me either. We’re lost, Else, and you’ve abandoned us both,” and with that she started walking closer.

  Just tell me where you are, Elisabeth wanted to say. I’ll come to you. I’ll find you, and I’ll find Margaret, too. Tell her not to be scared. Tell her I’m coming. But first I have to know where she is, and where you are, too.

  That was what Elisabeth was going to say. Those were the words that gathered instantly on her tongue. But again Jacqueline spoke before she could.

  “You’ll never find us,” she said, still walking. She stopped just a foot away from Elisabeth. Jacqueline’s eyes were narrowed and sad. “You’ve already lost us, Else. We’re already gone.”

  Just past the shores of the lake, something was rustling through the trees and underbrush. Elisabeth couldn’t quite see it; the thing was only a shadow, a huge inky shadow, large enough to shake the fruit from the trees as it moved. Cherries and apples hailed to the ice. Watching the woods, seeing the shadow, Elisabeth gasped. But Jacqueline didn’t look frightened at all.

  “Here,” she said, holding out her hand, offering Elisabeth the fruit she had just picked from the tree: a cherry, large and plump, as wide around as a tomato. “Take it,” Jacqueline said. “They’re delicious.”

  But Elisabeth was too terrified to react. The trees continued to shake and the shadow continued to move, plodding through the woods with steps so heavy that they shook the ice, each pace bringing it closer to the lake, closer to them.

  “Jacqueline—” Elisabeth finally said, but as soon as she spoke the ice broke beneath her feet and she plunged into the water below.

  The telephone was ringing. At first, still reeling from sleep, Elisabeth thought that she was back at the prison on the cot, surrounded by rushing bodies and the prison’s droning alarm. But no. That sound—it was the phone. The phone beside her.

  She was slumping in her chair, stuck in the midst of a slide to the floor, but now she straightened. Sunlight burned against the windows. It was daytime already? But the phone. It might be the police. It likely was. But only as she was lifting the receiver to her ear did Elisabeth realize the magnitude of that might be. Her daughter might be dead. Her daughter might be alive.

  “First of all, Margaret is fine,” she was told, but it wasn’t the secretarial voice of a police officer. It was Alfred’s. “She’s fine, Elisabeth. All is well. There’s nothing to worry about.”

  She couldn’t breathe. Her body was a stone. “Where are you?”

  “Delta Junction,” Alfred said. “Do you know it? We’re on our way to Tanacross. We’ll be there within two hours, I’m told.”

  “Margaret—”

  “—Is asleep in the back of the truck we’ve hitched. A supply truck. I had no idea piles of toilet paper could be so comfortable.”

  “Put her on.”

  “I’d like to let her rest,” Alfred said, “and I inte
nd to. We have a long hike ahead of us.”

  “Where—”

  “Besides, I can only talk for a moment,” Alfred said. “The truck’s fueling up now, but we’ll be off again soon. Have you seen the new military highway? It’s quite an operation, and I’ve heard it’s got young Tanacross growing up.”

  Elisabeth had heard that, too. The war had changed many things in Alaska, including Tanacross. It wasn’t in the bush anymore. Impelled by the constant threat of a Japanese invasion, a highway was being built to span the length of the territory and facilitate the war effort. Thousands of workers had been recruited for the project, and they worked on the highway day and night. As one of the largest settlements along the eastern half of the road, Tanacross was now the bustling home of construction crews and a frequent layover for army air traffic. The airfield was paved. Rows of one-room cabins had been built to house the highway workers. With the construction’s breakneck pace, the road was nearly complete, and every day a parade of trucks traveled east: construction trucks, army trucks, rigs with open backs that seemed to haul nothing more than pillars of swirling snow. Tanacross was closer than ever—busier than ever. THE LITTLE TOWN THAT COULD, read a headline in the Daily News-Miner just weeks before, and beneath it had been a foggy picture of Henry Isaac and half a dozen others, all of them grinning ear to ear.

  But she pushed Alfred’s question away.

  “Leave Margaret at the fuel station,” she said. “I don’t know what—”

  “Again, I have no intention of waking her up. She needs her rest. She’s coming with me.”

  “To Tanacross?”

  “Not exactly. And in fact that’s what I’m calling about: About a mile north of town is a small cabin. Mr. Sanford told me about it. It’s a place your Indians keep for hunting. A shelter. Go to it. Margaret and I will be waiting for you there. And then”—he let that float in the air for a second, and she could almost feel his breath coming through the line, warm and moist and as acrid as burning oil—“then I’ll keep my end of the bargain. I’ll take you to your sister.”