Vanishing Acts Read Free Page B

on.
By the time we climbed down at 4:30 a.m., I had had my first kiss, and it wasn't the three of us anymore.
Just then my father comes into the room. “I'm headed upstairs to watch Leno,” he says. “Lock up, okay?”
I glance up. “Where are my baby pictures?”
“In the albums.”
“No . . . these only go back to when I'm four or five.” I sit up. “It would be nice to have your wedding picture, too, for the video.”
I have the only photo of my mother that is on display in this house. She is on the cusp of smiling, and you cannot look at it without wondering who made her happy just then, and how.
My father looks down at the ground, and shakes his head a little. “Well, I knew it was going to happen sometime. Come on, then.”
Eric and I follow him to his bedroom and sit down on the double bed, on the side where he doesn't sleep. From the closet, my father takes down a tin with a Pepsi-Cola logo stamped onto the front. He dumps the contents onto the covers between Eric and me–dozens of photographs of my mother, draped in peasant skirts and gauze blouses, her black hair hanging down her back like a river. A wedding portrait: my mother in a belled white dress; my father trussed in his tuxedo, looking like he might bolt at any second. Photos of me, wrapped tight as a croissant, awkwardly balanced in my mother's arms. And one of my mother and father on an ugly green couch with me between them, a bridge made of dimpled flesh, of blended blood.
It is like visiting another planet when you only have one roll of film to record it, like coming to a banquet after a hunger strike–there is so much here that I have to consciously keep myself from racing through, before it all disappears. My face gets hot, as if I've been slapped. “Why were you hiding these?” He takes one photograph out of my hand and stares at it long enough for me to believe he has completely forgotten that Eric and I are in the room. “I tried keeping a few of the pictures out,” my father explains, “but you kept asking when she was coming home. And I'd pass them, and stop, and lose ten minutes or a half hour or a half day. I didn't hide them because I didn't want to look at them, Delia. I hid them because that was all I wanted to do.” He puts the wedding picture back in the tin and scatters the rest on top. “You can have them,” my father tells me. “You can have them all.”
He leaves us sitting in the near dark in his bedroom. Eric touches the photograph on the top as if it is as delicate as milkweed. “That,” he says quietly. “That's what I want with you.”
It's the ones I don't find that stay with me. The teenage boy who jumped off the Fairlee-Orford train bridge into the Connecticut River one frigid March; the mother from North Conway who vanished with a pot still boiling on the stove and a toddler in the playpen; the baby snatched out of a car in the Strafford post office parking lot while her sitter was inside dropping off a large package. Sometimes they stand behind me while I'm brushing my teeth; sometimes they're the last thing I see before I go to sleep; sometimes, like now, they leave me restless in the middle of the night.
There is a thick fog tonight, but Greta and I have trained enough in this patch of land to know our way by heart. I sit down on a mossy log while Greta sniffs around the periphery. Above me, something dangles from a branch, full and round and yellow.
I am little, and he has just finished planting a lemon tree in our backyard. I am dancing around it. I want to make lemonade, but there isn't any fruit because the tree is just a baby. How long will it take to grow one? I ask. A while, he tells me. I sit myself down in front of it to watch. I'll wait. He comes over and takes my hand. Come on, grilla, he says. If we're going to sit here that long, we'd better get something to eat.
There are some dreams that get stuck between your teeth when you sleep, so that when you open your mouth to yawn awake they fly