How Quickly She Disappears

by Raymond Fleischmann

  “What are you planning to—”

  “They’re waving me out, Elisabeth. They’re all finished. I’ve got to go.”

  “Alfred, leave Margaret there. Listen to me. Please.”

  “A mile north. Walk straight north from the landing strip. You’ll find it. It’s there. We’ll be waiting.”

  “Alfred—”

  “Good-bye, Elisabeth. Don’t worry. All is well. A mile north. Straight north.”

  She called out for him again, but he was gone. Then she was on her feet, and she was tearing through the house. Tanacross. Margaret was in Tanacross, and she’d be damned if she didn’t join her. Her sister was wrong. You’ll never find us? She would, and if necessary, she would bring Margaret back to Fairbanks over Alfred’s dead body.

  The closet in the master bedroom was where John kept it, and Elisabeth went there now. The room was empty. The whole house was quiet. The car was in the driveway—she had seen it from the corner of her eye as she sprinted through the living room—and Elisabeth could only guess where John might have gone. The police station? The base? A contemplative walk through the neighborhood? It didn’t matter. She didn’t need him, and she didn’t want him. Not for this.

  Like a broom, it was leaning against one corner of the closet. The Winchester rifle John had gotten at the potlatch. A minute later Elisabeth had the ammunition, too, which John kept with his tools in a utility chest beside the back door.

  She wasn’t an ace, but she was no fool around guns either. She had fired Winchesters before; at the start of each summer, as a kind of celebration, Tanacross would hold a shooting competition, and even the women were encouraged to participate. She had never actually loaded one, but she had watched John do it several times before, and she found now that it was just as easy as it looked.

  She loaded five rounds into the feed, and then she pocketed the small box of bullets. The clock in the kitchen read eleven, and the time was so surprising that it made Elisabeth pause in midstep. She had slept for twelve hours. Twelve hours? Sedatives or not, she could hardly believe it. But it didn’t matter. What mattered was that she was coming for her daughter, and again Elisabeth reminded herself of Margaret’s capability. The knife. Think of the knife.

  Until recently, the only way into Tanacross had been by plane. You’d had to find a bush pilot willing to take you, and most pilots had their own fixed routes. It could take hours, even days, just to find an available plane. But now Elisabeth had the highway. Now she didn’t have to wait for anyone. Tanacross was four hours away, a stretch of time that seemed both brief and interminable. Wait just four more hours, Margaret. Just four more hours.

  She was going to find her daughter. And then? Then she would have Alfred tell her where Jacqueline was. He could tell her, or he could die. She would leave that choice up to him.

  CHAPTER 37

  When Margaret was five years old, she was convinced that another little girl lived beneath her bed. It started simply enough. “What’s under the bed?” Margaret would ask, and Elisabeth would crouch, peek, and tell her, “Nothing, sweetheart. Not even any dust bunnies.” Then Margaret got more specific.

  “Can you check under the bed?” she asked one night.

  “For what?” Elisabeth said.

  “For her.”

  “For whom?”

  “The little girl,” Margaret said. “She sleeps under my bed at night.”

  Elisabeth peeked beneath the bed and told her, “Nope. No little girl. Nothing at all.”

  “Oh,” Margaret said. “Okay.”

  It went on like that for a month—every night, the same conversation. Elisabeth thought very little of the imaginary girl. John thought even less of her.

  “As long as we don’t have to feed her, I’m fine with it,” he said.

  And if Elisabeth had let it go, she would have been fine with it, too. Then, on a whim, during lunch one day, Elisabeth asked if the little girl had a name.

  “She does,” Margaret said, “but she won’t tell it to me.”

  Elisabeth nodded. It was just her and Margaret that afternoon. John worked weekends at a dairy farm, and he didn’t return until dinner.

  “Well, what does she tell you?” Elisabeth said. “What do you talk about?”

  “She asks me to come under the bed with her.”

  “That’s a silly thing to ask.”

  “Yeah.” Margaret chewed her sandwich. “She wants to take me away.”

  Elisabeth frowned. “Take you where?”

  “I don’t know,” Margaret said, sighing lightly.

  “And what does she look like? Have you seen her?”

  Margaret nodded. “When I don’t get out of bed, she stands next to me and looks at me.”

  Elisabeth sat straighter. “But again,” she said, though she wasn’t even sure why she was pressing the matter, “what does she look like?”

  And Margaret stared straight at her and said, flatly, “She has big black eyes, and she looks like Jacqueline.”

  That was the first time Margaret had ever mentioned Elisabeth’s sister, and frankly, it was baffling. She and John had never told her about Jacqueline. They had never even mentioned Jacqueline in front of her.

  “It’s a name she heard someplace,” John said. “Jacqueline Logan. Jacqueline of Holland.”

  “Jacqueline of Holland?”

  “I don’t know.” He shrugged. “She could have heard it anywhere.”

  But Elisabeth couldn’t let it go. That night, when Margaret asked her to check beneath the bed, Elisabeth leaned forward and said, “For Jacqueline?”

  “No,” Margaret told her. “Her name’s not Jacqueline. She just looks like Jacqueline.”

  “Who’s Jacqueline?”

  Margaret yawned. “Aunt Jacqueline. The little girl looks just like her.”

  “How do you know what Jacqueline looked like?”

  “Because she looks like you,” Margaret said.

  “But I thought she was a little girl. I’m your mom. I’m not a little girl anymore.”

  “No,” Margaret said, and she yawned again.

  They were quiet. Elisabeth tucked Margaret’s sheets tighter beneath her body, glancing away for a moment, and then she turned back to her daughter. “How do you know who—” she started, but Margaret was already asleep. For a minute, she watched the rise and fall of her chest, the easy motion of her eyes behind their lids. Then Elisabeth turned for the door. Tomorrow, she thought. Tomorrow, and she left.

  Five hours later, half past one in the morning, Margaret screamed. Their home at the time was very small—a two-bedroom apartment above a pharmacy on Cedar Street—and Elisabeth was up and on her feet almost instantly. The door, the hallway, the stairs to the pharmacy on her left, then bang, she was in Margaret’s bedroom, but Margaret was nowhere in sight. Her bed was tousled but empty. The room was silent.

  For a moment, Elisabeth just stood there and stared into the darkness. She couldn’t even think to turn on the light. Margaret’s babyhood was four years’ distant, but Elisabeth still possessed so many of the tendencies that had come along with it: the lightness of sleep, the readiness for disaster, the expectation that the worst was right around the corner—that Margaret would choke, would suffer, would die if her mother wasn’t ceaselessly vigilant.

  And now, as Elisabeth stood in Margaret’s doorway, staring at the vapid darkness, it seemed that her paranoia was justified. Her daughter was gone. Missing. Only a few seconds passed, but in that time Elisabeth felt a terror so absolute that all of the blood in her body seemed to freeze. Her heart didn’t pulse but paused. Her fingers went rigid and cold. Then, before she really even knew it, she was on her hands and knees beside Margaret’s bed, clawing blindly at the void beneath the mattress. All the while, she expected a pair of eyes to come glinting back at her, not Margaret’s but the other little gir
l’s, the imposter’s, the thief’s.

  Then she heard crying. Still on all fours, she turned and peered over her shoulder, and there was Margaret, sobbing in the corner behind the door.

  “You didn’t look,” Margaret wailed. “You didn’t look. You didn’t look.” Elisabeth had her in her arms. Margaret was shaking. “She climbed into bed with me,” she said. “I woke up and she was lying beside me, and she was watching me.”

  Margaret slept in Elisabeth and John’s room that night, and that was the last of the little girl beneath the bed. “She went away,” Margaret explained a few days later, casual and calm, free of elaboration. And in spite of her own curiosity, Elisabeth let it go. She chalked it up to fantasy, to one of those things that kids do.

  But now she saw it differently. It was an omen. Of course the little girl had stood beside Margaret’s bed and watched her. Jacqueline wasn’t just Elisabeth’s twin sister. She was a specter that loomed over them all. She was a weight around their necks.

  But she wouldn’t be for much longer. The striving—the running—was nearly done. This was coming to an end. Either Alfred would finish this, or Elisabeth would. By the end of today, she would have the truth about her sister, or Alfred would be dead and the truth would be lost forever. Either way, it would all be finished, and in knowing this a concentrated calm overtook her. The road. The banks of snow. An overcast sky, thick and gray as porridge. Four hours passed in a haze. Elisabeth didn’t cry. She didn’t talk to herself out loud. She didn’t pound her fists against the steering wheel, and she didn’t think too much about what she was doing or where she was going.

  Mostly, she watched the woods, mile after mile of trees weighed down with snow. They had been living in Fairbanks for only three months, but in that time something had been missing from her life that she didn’t notice until now: the vast, suffocating bush. Fairbanks was wild in its own way—wilder than anywhere in Pennsylvania—but it wasn’t anything like this, the Alaska that now unfolded in every direction like a boundless sea of green and white waves. This was the real Alaska, the Alaska that swallowed you whole, the Alaska where you could scream and it wouldn’t even echo.

  And yet it was beautiful. Perhaps being swallowed whole wasn’t so terrible. There had been a time when the bush had intimidated her. Just months before they moved to Tanacross, a tragedy had struck the town, and Elisabeth had taken it to heart. Silas Denny, not seventeen years old, got caught in a snowstorm on his way back from a village north of Fish Lake. He was drunk, folks assumed. Why else would he have been so stupid as to set out at night, and in the dead of winter no less? He never made it to Tanacross, and a pair of hunters found him two days later—or they found what was left of him. He was torn to shreds, a mess of frozen gore and grinning, lipless teeth. Even his eyeballs were gone, Elisabeth had been told, the fast work of crows. The wolves had gotten the rest of him, and the hunters could tell from their tracks that the wolves had stalked drunk Silas for almost a mile.

  That was what the Alaskan bush had once meant to Elisabeth: It was a place of unforgiving brutality, a place that would literally eat you alive. And for that reason she had been frightened of it, and that fear had made her see the bush as an ugly, monstrous blight.

  But now she saw how wrong she had been. Now she saw the ragged elegance. The rolling trees. The cake-icing snow. The knuckled mountains in the distance, a thousand craggy peaks piled one after another. As she bumped through the icy tracks carved into the road, the minutes and the miles peeled away, and Elisabeth was so overcome by the beauty of the Tanana valley that all she did was watch, watch and drive.

  Then she crossed the Tanana River twice in quick succession, and she snapped to attention. Tanacross was only a few miles away. It was almost three o’clock, and the sun was already dipping lower in the sky, bathing the world in a cool wash. She wasn’t sure what to expect from Tanacross. She knew that the town had changed, but the article in the newspaper had included only one photograph, and the town itself had been shown very little. It would be bigger, she knew. It would be busier. That was no secret. In four hours of driving she had passed dozens of trucks—some of them army trucks, some of them work trucks, all of them moving fast, the gears of industry and urgency and deadlines to meet. Yes, Tanacross would be different.

  It was the extent of that difference that shocked her. She turned off the highway at a sign that read TANACROSS, and then she rode for a quarter mile down an uneven road. The snow was so trampled in places that loose dirt actually showed through, spots of muddy brown poking out from the frost like sores. Then she came to a clearing and the wide expanse of the Tanana, belted now by a wooden bridge reinforced with steel bands.

  The town on the other side of the river was barely recognizable. Dozens of new homes had been built alongside the river, and these were organized into three crescent streets. As the village had expanded, swaths of trees had been razed, and the whole of Tanacross now sat in soupy mud, even with the snow softly falling. Cars and trucks were everywhere, and the roads between the cabins were as pitted as minefields.

  But it wasn’t the construction or the mud or even the cars and trucks that surprised her. It was the sight of so many people. There were bodies hustling everywhere. The town was teeming, and yet Elisabeth recognized no one. Driving up the central avenue toward the landing strip, she felt as if she was driving through a bustling tourist town that she had never visited before. She stared through the windshield in shock, but no one seemed to think twice about her.

  To hell with this. She could move faster on foot. She parked beside one of the new cabins, about a hundred yards from the landing strip. She tightened the scarves around her neck, and she tied an extra to the stock and barrel of the rifle, a makeshift strap. Then, with the rifle slung behind her, she cut between two rows of cabins, and she was back in the old Tanacross, the Tanacross she recognized.

  But she recognized that something was missing, too. Her house was gone, and the school with it. An empty slot now sat between Joseph Howard’s on the north and Will Roy’s on the south. There wasn’t a single slat or board left behind. The space stood out like a missing tooth.

  “Else?”

  She turned. Teddy Granger was standing a few feet away, and he was staring at her in surprise.

  “Else,” he said again, smiling and rushing forward. He hugged her. He held a candy cane in one hand. “What in the world are you doing here?”

  But Elisabeth ignored his question.

  “The house,” she said, glancing back at the empty space. “Where’s the house?”

  “It burned,” he said, shaking his head in confusion. “Didn’t you get my letters?”

  No. Obviously not. Clearly not.

  “What happened?” Elisabeth said, turning again to the space where the house had been.

  “It burned in December. The curtains caught a lantern and the whole thing went up.” Teddy frowned. “John’s successor ‘didn’t know’ about gas lanterns. That’s what he said. ‘Didn’t know.’ ‘You didn’t know fire catches things on fire?’ That’s what I said. He and his wife got out in one piece, but damn if that thing didn’t burn.” He raised one hand and pointed up the road. The frame of a new home already stood at the end of the row. “New school opens in April. Me and Buddy and Big Paul—”

  But Elisabeth was walking away, and Teddy’s voice trailed off. She felt his eyes still watching her, but she didn’t feel much else. It seemed that she was floating down the road, and absurdly, out of nowhere, she thought of the National Bellas Hess catalogue from months before, the happy husband and the doting wife with their baby in the neat red stroller. Look at these two. Now look at you. Now look again at them.

  “Else?” she heard Teddy say. “Else, where are you going? What’s going on?” She could tell from the rising timbre of his voice that now he realized how strange this was—her with a rifle slung on her back, marching through the snow.


  But it was all she could do just to tell him, “I have to go. I have something to do.”

  Forget it. Forget Tanacross. Forget the house. She was right—she had something to do, and now she was going to do it. She was going to get her daughter back, and she was going to put an end to this. Hell or high water, she was going to. Clutching her parka and her scarves, Elisabeth floated down the road in the direction of the landing strip.

  A mile north. Straight north. Straight into the bush. She walked slowly but steadily, and she heard nothing more from Teddy. At the end of the road, Daniel Nilak was standing in the open door of Mack’s old home. He was leaning on a pair of crutches, and after a moment, he lifted one hand and waved to her as she passed.

  * * *

  —

  For a quarter of a mile, the walk was easy enough. The snow was falling faster now, and what rested on the ground already reached halfway to her knees, but at first Elisabeth had the luxury of following a track. The path was no wider than her shoulders—on either side of it, the spruce trees and aspen trees leaned so far forward that their crests nearly touched—but the path was a track nonetheless, one that the Athabaskans used, well-worn and easygoing.

  Then the track curved sharply west, and Elisabeth couldn’t follow it anymore. Walk straight north from the landing strip, Alfred had told her, and he had even repeated those directions. A mile north. Straight north. She didn’t have any choice. She left the track behind.

  That was when the work began. If the first quarter mile qualified as the bush, the rest of the walk qualified as something else altogether. This was a different planet. This was swallowed whole. This was Alaska. Tarred with clumps of snow on every branch, the trees were so dense that Elisabeth couldn’t see more than twenty feet in front of her. With no track to follow, she weaved through the forest with the stumbling gracelessness of a drunk staggering home. Here, the snow reached her knees, and yet everywhere the underbrush stretched through the frost like the slender tentacles of some hidden creature trying to pull her down.