Vanishing Acts

  Elise has shiny dark hair twisted into a knot at the base of her neck, and a fine graph of lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth. She is wearing a peasant shirt embroidered with colorful birds, and jeans covered with Sharpie-marker lines of text. My eyes focus on one: Oh daughter of ashes and mother of blood.

  "Sandburg," I murmur.

  Elise looks up at me, impressed. "Not many people read poetry these days."

  "Fitz is a writer," Delia says.

  "Actually, I'm a hack for a second-rate paper."

  Elise traces the phrase on her jeans. "I always thought it would be wonderful to be a writer," she says. "To know, just like that, how to put the right words together."

  I smile politely. The truth is, if I do miraculously manage to put the right words together, it's by default, because I've already used up all the wrong ones. And when you get right down to it, what I don't say is probably more important than what I do.

  Then again, maybe Elise Vasquez already knows this.

  She stares out the sliding glass door into the backyard, where Victor has taken Sophie to see a bird's nest, where the eggs are hatching. He lifts her up so she can get a closer look, and then they disappear behind a wall of cacti.

  "Thank you," Elise says, "for bringing her."

  Delia turns to her. "I won't keep you from seeing Sophie."

  Elise glances at me uncomfortably.

  "He's my best friend," Delia says. "He knows about all of it."

  Just then Sophie comes running back inside. "It's so cool ... they have teeth on their beaks," she says breathlessly. "Can we stay until they're out?"

  Sophie tugs on Delia's hand, until she stands up. In the doorway, Victor chuckles. "I tried to explain that it might take a while," he says.

  Delia answers him, but she is looking at her mother. "That's all right," she says. "I don't mind waiting." She lets Sophie pull her outside, toward the tree.

  Elise Vasquez and I stand shoulder to shoulder, watching the woman we both feel we lost, and maybe never really had.

  On the way home, we stop for coffee. Sophie squats on the sidewalk at the cafe, drawing a crime-scene outline around Greta with colored chalk. Delia drums her fingers on the edge of her cup but doesn't seem to be inclined to drink anything from it. "Can you picture them together?" she asks finally, when the wheels of her mind have stopped turning.

  "Elise and Victor?"

  "No," Delia says. "Elise and my father."

  "Dee, no one can ever imagine their parents doing it."

  Take mine, for example. The sad fact is, my parents didn't do it. They managed to have me, of course, but most of the time I was growing up, my salesman father was off screwing a flight attendant in another city, and my mother was furiously busy pretending he wasn't.

  But my father was not Andrew Hopkins. In all the years I've known Delia, I can't remember him dating anyone seriously, so I can't even fathom what he'd look for in a woman. If you asked me, though, I'd never have imagined him falling for someone like Elise. She reminds me of an orchid, exotic and fragile. Andrew is more like ragweed: stealthy, resilient, stronger than you think.

  I look at the comma curve of Delia's neck, at the bony points of her shoulder blades, a terrain that has been mapped by Eric. "Some people aren't meant to be together," I say.

  Suddenly a ragged man wearing a hairnet and flip-flops walks toward us, holding a stack of pamphlets. Sophie, scared, hides behind her mother's chair. "My brother," the vagrant asks me, "have you found the Lord Jesus Christ?"

  "I didn't know he was looking for me."

  "Is He your personal savior?"

  "You know," I say, "I'm still kind of hoping to rescue myself."

  The man shakes his head, dreadlocks like snakes. "None of us are strong enough for that," he replies, and moves on.

  "I think that's illegal," I mutter to Delia. "Or at least it should be. Nobody should have to swallow religion with their coffee."

  When I look up, she's staring at me. "How come you don't believe in God?" Delia asks.

  "How come you do?"

  She looks down at Sophie, and her whole face softens. "I guess it's because some things are too incredible for people to take all the credit."

  Or the blame, I think.

  Two tables over, the zealot approaches an elderly couple. "Believe in the Father," he preaches.

  Delia turns in his direction. "It's never that simple," she says.

  When Delia was pregnant with Sophie, I was the labor coach. I sort of fell into it by default, when Eric, who had promised that he wouldn't fuck up this time, wound up drying out just about the time Lamaze classes started. I found myself sitting in a circle of married couples, trying not to let my heart race as the nurse instructed me to settle Delia between my legs and trace my hands over the swell of her belly.

  Delia went into labor in the middle of the frozen foods aisle at Shaw's market, and she phoned me from the manager's office. By the time we got to the hospital, I had worked myself into a near panic about how I would be able to do whatever it was that I was supposed to do as a labor coach, without having to look between her legs. Maybe I could request a position at her shoulders. Maybe I could pull the doctor aside and explain the logistics of the situation.

  As it happened, I didn't have to worry about that at all. The minute the anesthesiologist rolled Delia onto her hip to insert the epidural, I took one look at the needle, passed out, and wound up with sixty stitches at my hairline.

  I awakened on a cot next to her. "Hey, Cowboy," she said, smiling over the tiny peach of a head that poked out from the blanket in her arms. "Thanks for all the help."

  "Don't mention it," I said, wincing as my scalp throbbed.

  "Sixty stitches," Delia explained, and then she added, "I only had ten."

  I found myself looking at her head. "Not there," she said, giving me a moment to figure it out. "You're not going to pass out again, are you?"

  I didn't. Instead, I managed to lurch to the edge of Delia's hospital bed, so that I could take a look at the baby. I remember looking into the fuzzy blue of Sophie's eyes and marveling at the fact that there was now one other person in this world who understood what it was like to be completely surrounded by Delia, who'd already learned that it couldn't stay that way.

  I had Sophie in my arms when Eric came in. He went straight to Delia and kissed her on the mouth, then bent his forehead against hers for a moment, as if whatever he was thinking might be transferred by osmosis. Then Eric turned, his eyes locking on his daughter. "You can hold her," Delia prompted.

  But Eric didn't make any move to take Sophie from me. I took a step toward him, and saw what Delia must have overlooked--Eric's hands were shaking so hard that he had buried them in his coat pockets.

  I pushed the baby against his chest, so that he'd have no choice but to grab hold. "It's okay," I said under my breath--To Eric? To Sophie? To myself?--and as I transferred this tiny prize to Eric's arms, I held on longer than I had to. I made damn sure he was steady, before I let go.

  I have seventeen messages, all from my editor. The first starts by asking me to call her back. By the third, Marge is demanding it. Message eleven reminds me that if monkeys can be sent into space, they can certainly be trained to write for the New Hampshire Gazette.

  In the last voice mail, Marge tells me that if I don't have something on her desk by nine A.M., she is going to fill my page space with the Xeroxes of my ass that I took at the office Christmas party.

  So I pull down the shades in the motel. I turn up the TV, to drown out the moans of a couple one thin wall away from me. I crank up the air-conditioning. Andrew Hopkins, I type, is not what you expect when you walk through the corridors of the Madison Street Jail.

  I shake my head and hit the delete button, erasing the paragraph.

  Like any father, all Andrew Hopkins wants to talk about is his daughter.

  That sentence, I backspace into oblivion.

  Andrew Hopkins has ghosts in his eyes, I write
, and then think: We all do.

  I pace around the island of the bed. Who wouldn't jump at the chance to change something about his life? Two hundred more points on an SAT, a Pulitzer, a Heisman, a Nobel. A more handsome face, a thinner body. A few more years with the babies that grew up when you had forgotten to pay attention. Five more minutes with a loved one who has died.

  The moment I would do over is the one I've never been brave enough to have. I'd tell Delia how much I love her, and she would look at me the way she has always looked at Eric.

  What I want to write--what I need to write--is not what the New Hampshire Gazette is paying me for. Sitting down at my laptop, I erase what I've written. I start fresh.

  VI

  Why is there then

  No more to tell? We turned to other things.

  I haven't any memory--have you?--

  Of ever coming to the place again.

  --Robert Frost, "The Exposed Nest"

  Eric

  Chris Hamilton's paralegal spends three days trying to trace the current whereabouts of the neighbors who used to live next door to Elise and Andrew twenty-eight years ago. She sticks her head in the door of the conference room shortly after lunchtime. "Want the good news or bad news?"

  I look up over the stack of papers I'm wading through. "There's actually good news?"

  "Well, no. But I thought I'd make you feel better."

  "What's the bad news?"

  "Alice Young," she says. "I found her."

  Alice Young was a teenager who lived with her parents next door to Elise and Andrew; at one point she had babysat for Delia. "And?"

  "She's in Vienna."

  "Good," I say. "Subpoena her."

  "Might want to rethink that. She lives with the sisters of the Order of the Bloody Cross."

  "She's a nun?"

  "She's a nun who took a vow of silence ten years ago," the paralegal says.

  "For Christ's sake ..."

  "Exactly. However, I did manage to find the other neighbor, Elizabeth Peshman. She's at some place called Sunset Acres; I assume it's a retirement community."

  I take the information. "Did you call?"

  "No one answers," she says.

  It's a Sun City, Arizona, address; it can't be that far away. "I'll go find her."

  It takes me two hours to reach the town, and there are so many retirement communities I wonder how I'll ever find the right one. However, the clerk who sells me gas and a Snickers bar knows the name right away. "Two lights, and then a left. You'll see the sign," she says, as she rings me up.

  From the looks of things, Sunset Acres is not a bad place to finish up one's life. It is a turn off the main drag, a long drive lined with saguaros and desert rock gardens. I have to stop at a stucco guard booth--apparently these seniors value their privacy. The man inside is stooped and age-spotted, and looks like he could be a resident himself. "Hi," I say. "I'm trying to find Elizabeth Peshman. I tried to call--"

  "Line's down," the guard says. He points to a small parking lot. "No cars allowed. I'll take you up."

  As I walk beside the guard, I wonder what sort of facility wouldn't allow cars up to the main building. It seems like quite an inconvenience, given the fact that some of the residents have to be arthritic or even disabled. As soon as we crest the hill, the guard points. "Third from the left," he says.

  There are acres of crosses and stars and rose quartz obelisks. OUR DEAR MOTHER, reads one tombstone. NEVER FORGOTTEN. DOTING HUSBAND.

  Elizabeth Peshman is dead. I have no witness to corroborate the fact that thirty years ago, Elise Matthews was the drunk that Andrew says she was. "Guess you're not talking either," I say out loud.

  Although it is beastly hot, there are fresh flowers wilting in pots beside Elizabeth's tombstone. "She's real popular," the guard says. "There are some folks here who never get visitors. But this one, she gets calls from a bunch of old students."

  "She was a teacher?" I ask, and my mind catches on the word. A teacher.

  "You get what you need?" the guard asks.

  "I think so," I say, and I hurry back to my car.

  *

  Abigail Nguyen is mixing paste when I arrive. A slight woman with two knots of hair at the top of her head, like the ears of a bear, she looks up and gives me a smile. "You must be Mr. Talcott," she says. "Come on in."

  When the preschool where Delia went closed down in the mid-eighties, Abigail started her own Montessori classes in the basement of a church. She was the third school listed in the Yellow Pages, and she had answered the phone herself.

  We sit down, giants on miniature chairs. "Ms. Nguyen, I'm an attorney, and I'm working on behalf of a girl you taught in the late 1970s ... Bethany Matthews."

  "The one who was kidnapped."

  I shift a little. "Well, that hasn't been determined yet. I'm representing her father."

  "I've been following it all in the papers, and on the local news."

  As has the rest of Phoenix. "I wonder, Mrs. Nguyen, if you might be able to tell me about Bethany back then."

  "She was a good child. Quiet. Tended to work by herself, instead of with her peers."

  "Did you get a chance to know her parents?"

  The teacher glances away for a moment. "Sometimes Bethany came to school disheveled, or wearing dirty clothes ... it raised a red flag for us. I think I even called the mother ... what was her name again?"

  "Elise Matthews."

  "Yes, that's right."

  "What did Elise say when you called?"

  "I can't remember," Mrs. Nguyen says.

  "Do you recall anything else about Elise Matthews?"

  The teacher nods. "I assume you mean the fact that she smelled like a distillery."

  I feel my blood flow faster. "Did you report her to child protective services?"

  The teacher stiffens. "There weren't any signs of abuse."

  "You said she came to school disheveled."

  "There's a big difference between a child not being bathed every night, and parental neglect, Mr. Talcott. It's not our job to police what happens at home. Take it from me--I've seen children burned on the soles of their feet by their parents' cigarettes, and I've seen children come to school with broken bones and welts on their backs. I've seen children who hide in the supply closet at pickup time because they don't want to go home. Mrs. Matthews might have liked her afternoon cocktail, but she deeply loved her little girl, and Bethany clearly knew that."

  You'd be surprised, I think.

  "Mrs. Nguyen, thank you for your time." I hand her my card, with Chris Hamilton's office number penciled in. "If you think of anything else, please call me."

  I have just started my car in the parking lot when there is a knock on the window. Mrs. Nguyen stands with her arms folded. "There was one incident," she says, when I roll down the window. "Mrs. Matthews was late to pick up. We called the house, and kept calling, and there was no answer. I let Bethany stay for the afternoon session of school, and then I drove her home. The mother was passed out on the couch when we got there ... so I took her home with me and let her stay the night. The next day, Mrs. Matthews apologized profusely."

  "Why didn't you call Bethany's father?"

  A breeze blows a strand of Mrs. Nguyen's hair from her bun. "The parents were going through a divorce. A week before, the mother had specifically asked us not to allow her husband to have any contact with the child."

  "How come?"

  "Some threat he'd made, if I remember right," Mrs. Nguyen says. "She had reason to believe that he might take Bethany and run."

  Andrew looks thinner; although that might just be the baggy prison uniform. "How's Delia?" he asks, like always. But this time, I don't answer. My patience is wound too tight.

  I stand with my hands in my pockets. "You told me that the kidnapping of your child was a spur of the moment thing, a knee-jerk reaction to a bad situation. You told me that when you went home to get Delia's blanket, you saw your ex-wife passed out and knew it was time to ta
ke matters into your own hands. Did I get that right?"

  Andrew nods.

  "Then how do you explain the fact that you threatened to take your daughter away from your wife before you actually did it?" Frustrated, I kick a chair so that it spins across the tiny conference room. "What else aren't you telling me, Andrew?"

  Muscles tighten along the column of Andrew's throat, but he doesn't answer.

  "I can't do this alone," I say, and I walk out of the room without looking back.

  Thirty days before Andrew's trial, the State notices up its witnesses. I respond like I always do--by requesting the criminal records of everyone the prosecutor plans to call to the stand. This is basic defense law, for those who have no defense: Do what you can to shoot holes in anything and everything the State throws your way.

  I get the records in the mail as I am running out the door to the courthouse for a 404B hearing that Emma Wasserstein's scheduled. Waiting for the judge to receive me in chambers, I open the envelope. Delia doesn't have a record, of course, so there are only two criminal record printouts. It's not much of a surprise to find a clean report for Detective LeGrande, the retired policeman who had once been in charge of the kidnapping case. It's the second report that interests me, anyway--the one for Elise Vasquez. Delia's mother was busted on a DWI charge after a car accident in 1972.

  It's a felony. It happened when she was pregnant with Dee. It's not going to be easy, but I'm sure as hell going to try to impeach Elise with that conviction on the witness stand. It's a credibility argument: If someone's been drinking chronically, his or her memory recall is even more suspect.

  I ought to know.

  Emma Wasserstein turns the corner and comes to a halt when she sees me outside the judge's chambers. "He's not ready yet?"

  I glance at her prodigious belly. "Unlike you," I say, "apparently not."

  She rolls her eyes. "Maybe you didn't get the memo, but we aren't in seventh grade anymore."

  The door opens, and Judge Noble's assistant lets us into chambers. "Very cranky," she warns under her breath. "Someone hasn't had his protein today."

  We retreat to our seats and wait for Judge Noble to let us know it's all right to speak. "Ms. Wasserstein," he sighs, "what is it this time?"

  "Your Honor, I'd like to have a prior bad act admitted as evidence. Namely, the assault conviction of Charles Matthews in December of 1976. It goes to motive."