va-nish (v) 1: to pass quickly from sight: disappear
2: to pass completely from existence
There’s no easy way to say this, ma’am, the memory of the highway patrolman’s voice repeated in her head, a loop. Your husband’s vanished.
Vanished.
Nidra shuddered. A year had passed, and no time at all. Frost clung to the windshield, so the wipers dragged and whined. She was almost driving blind. Visiting the place where Karl’s truck had wrecked was dangerous in dawn’s tricky light.
Nidra’s skin vibrated when she approached the ramp to Interstate 285, where the curve grew sharp and a driver might spin and slide backward down a steep embankment, crashing into a stand of hardy Georgia pines. Like Karl. Nidra stopped a few yards before the exit, since it wasn’t safe to linger near the curve. She parked on the shoulder with her flashers on. Her tiny Corolla shuddered when the semis thundered past with their urgent loads, spraying gravel from monstrous tires. The spot reeked of tragic endings.
Karl had been on his way back home. At least she knew that much.
Dead leaves made the grass so slick that Nidra nearly slipped as she made her way down the sharp grade. She wasn’t sure she could find the exact place a year later, but a crumpled diet soda can winked from the bed of leaves, marking the spot. A long scrape remained across the thick-trunked tree where the Ford’s rear fender had rested. The ugly white smear of exposed bark reminded Nidra of an open scab; no longer bleeding, not yet healed.
Nidra expected to find the truck waiting, an apparition. To find him. His voice. His face. Every shadow was Karl hiding in the shrubs; every rustle was Karl swinging from the tree branches. The Queen of Denial, her daughter Sharlene had called her last night.
That night, police had called Karl by all three of his names and asked if he was her husband. She said she’d rather they didn’t come in, thank you, and waited to find out what the bail was. She knew the situation was bound to be bad, since they had come to the house instead of calling and used his full name like he was a serial killer. We found this wallet in your pickup rolled over off 285 near the Atlanta Road exit. There’s no easy way to say this, but your husband’s vanished.
Then the officers had waited as if they expected her to cry or have a fit like on TV.
But they didn’t know Karl. They didn’t know about The Talk they’d had from Dr. Ross, Asia’s pediatric oncologist, about their youngest daughter’s white cell count. Karl might wish he’d vanished, all right.
“He didn’t vanish,” she told the police. “He ran—I guarantee it.”
Karl would come back. And when he did, he would wish he had never left. One year ago, this was where he had changed his mind and decided he wouldn’t come home. Decided to flee to a secret life. To leave her and Sharlene to manage Asia’s fevers and whimpers when it was time to go back to the doctors.
Nidra wiped away angry tears.
“Cowardly sonofabitch,” she said to the tree.
Asia’s school was a twenty-minute drive each way. In a rare moment of solidarity, Nidra and Karl had petitioned the county to pull Asia out of Glory Elementary around the corner because she’d come home crying every day from the teasing. The kids had called her Ghost because she was so ill. They bumped into her in the hallways purposely, pretending they could not see her as she passed them. Nidra had never seen Karl so mad. To keep him from doing something drastic and going to jail, they decided to find Asia a new school.
Spring Valley had better manners, smaller class sizes, and fresher paint. The only drawback was the long drive. When Karl’s office shut down, he had been Asia’s “designated driver,” as he liked to say, hardy har. In the months before Karl left, Asia often needed to come home from school early because she felt weak or sick. They had spent entire days shuttling back and forth between Asia’s school, her doctor, and the hospital. Or just the hospital.
But not today.
Asia sat safely strapped on the passenger side, her bright red ski cap bent forward as she scribbled in her composition book. Asia had taken up drawing during her last long stay at Piedmont Children’s. Asia was drawing Karl’s profile again; his bushy mop of hair, the rounded tip of his nose, pronounced shading of his skin.
“Looks just like him,” Nidra said. Down to the knot in her stomach.
Asia didn’t answer, absorbed by her pencil’s even strokes.
The school driveway was lit up in brake lights from waiting cars. Asia might still be marked tardy. Nidra wished she hadn’t slipped out earlier to go to the interstate. The day had just started, and she was already behind.
A family of stick figures was pasted to the rear window of the SUV directly in front of Nidra’s car, even a dog at the end. But a space stood empty between the tallest and third tallest. Nidra wondered who had vanished, and how. A parent? Had some poor soul been left alone with four children to raise? She only had two, but some mornings she dreaded getting out of bed. She wished she had a time machine to go back and stop Karl from getting in his truck. Or else jump in with him.
“Did you know black walnut trees have a poison so nothing else will grow near them?” Asia said. She learned a new thing about trees each week in third-grade science.
“Nope, didn’t know that.”
“Does every plant and animal do something special no one else does?”
“Maybe,” Nidra said. “Probably, yes.”
“What about me?” Asia said.
“Everything about you is special.”
“No, really, Mom.”
Asia’s first teacher had advised Nidra to smile more, advice that was harder to remember each day. But she tried. “There.”
“What? You’re smiling?”
Nidra nodded and kissed the top of her cap. “Yep. You’re the only one who can make me do that, pumpkin.”
“Good one. Love you, Mom.”
Asia sprang out of her door before Nidra could say I love you, too.
Asia watched the easy bounce in her daughter’s gait. Asia wasn’t dragging like she used to before Karl left. She walked just like the other kids, her backpack swinging between her shoulders like the pendulum on a grandfather clock.
Still, Spring Valley’s students and parents stared, heads slowly turning to watch her daughter as she walked up the stairs and into the school’s freshly painted doors.
“Didn’t anyone teach you manners?” she called out, too loudly. She sounded like Karl, but she couldn’t help it. Even Asia turned her head with the rest to see what the fuss was about.
Nidra waved at her daughter and drove away.
The sedan parked outside her house looked like an undercover police car: a dark blue Crown Victoria. Nidra’s heart beat so quickly that the rush of blood dizzied her. Karl had been in jail, that was all. Or on the run. Of course! He’d been a petty thief and a dealer in high school and promised he’d never stray again, so he’d been too ashamed to tell her and the girls. Nidra heard herself make a sound that was half laugh, half sob, an ecstatic rage.
But it was only Lenore Augustine waiting in the driver’s seat, studying Vogue like it was contagious. Nidra was so disappointed to find Lenore that she nearly cried.
“Nidra!” Lenore said. “There you are. Have you seen that mess across the way? Hard to believe my brothers used to hunt squirrels and rabbits out here.”
The nearby construction site hadn’t seemed so bad when the foliage in Nidra’s yard kept the new development hidden. Their house was built high atop a slope, so it had seemed like a tree house in the forest even though they lived only ten minutes from I-285 and five minutes from Publix. The builders’ noise hadn’t bothered Nidra as long as she could feel enfolded in the woods. But winter was coming, leaves were thinning, and the ugliness was in plain view.
“Answer’s still no,” Nidra said.
“Hear me out this time. It’s almost a year. Next week is the anniversary.”
“You don’t have to tell me it’s been a year,” Nidra said.
Lenore came by every three months. She and Karl had both worked at the same Realty office before Clarkson/Myers shut down and everyone scattered for new jobs. Lenore had ended up in insurance, and Karl had ended up nowhere. Lenore and Karl had been so close, hitting Happy Hour at Parkfield Lanes two or three times a month, that Nidra would have suspected them of an affair if Lenore hadn’t been a year older than his mother. Right before Asia’s diagnosis, Lenore had told Nidra they had married too young. Nobody warns young people not to get married unless you can march into Hell side by side.
When Lenore gave her car door a push, Nidra had no choice but to step back and let her out. Microscopic wrinkles painted a patchwork across Lenore’s face, barely hidden by her caked makeup’s false glow of youth. Had Karl showered with Lenore at cheap motels, run his fingers through her lifeless hair? Nidra couldn’t quite see it, but she couldn’t quite unsee it either.
“Do you know how hard it is to get a vanishing cert from the Georgia Highway Patrol?” Lenore said. “My client list would kill for your incident report—not to mention, my boss would kill me if he knew I was out here. In seven days, the insurance will be a much bigger fight. But you paid extra for the comp package, and Karl made me promise I’d look out for you.”
“So he planned it,” Nidra said. “With you. That’s what you’re saying.” Karl was a con artist through and through. He’d put on a hell of a show with his tears and carrying on before he’d driven off in the Ford.
“You know you don’t mean that, Nidra. I’m saying to fill out the paperwork. The money is yours, and you should have it. You need it for Asia. For the medical bills.”
Lenore’s eyes reminded Nidra of the smug pity in Dr. Ross’s face when he saw Asia waiting in his examination room, her cap bobbing as she swung her legs to and fro on the table’s perch. Can’t you see how pale Asia is? Sharlene had screamed during their fight last night. You just don’t want to look, Mom!
But no. That couldn’t be. Asia had three more weeks before her next doctor’s appointment. Asia was symptom-free, without the high temperatures, loss of appetite, or vomiting that had sent her and Karl to the emergency room with her bundled like a foundling night after night. Three weeks before Dr. Ross would test Asia’s levels and start the next horror show ride.
“Asia is fine.”
“Of course she’s fine,” Lenore said. “But you have bills—”
“Cut the bullshit,” Nidra said. “Just tell me where he is.”
Lenore pursed her lips, a portrait of heartbreak.
“He’s gone, sugar,” Lenore said. “That’s what I keep trying to tell you. There are support groups, if that’s what you need. Books I can give you. I went through it with my mom, so I know. I expect her to tap me on the shoulder every day. It’s been hell. But read what the police said—no one could have walked away from that crash alive. I wish it wasn’t true—I loved him like a baby brother—but Karl has vanished. He’s gone.”
Sharlene had seen Nidra with Devon last night. That was what started their fight.
Devon was Shar’s high school geometry teacher. He’d asked Nidra out for coffee after a parent conference three months before, as if to soften his report. That first night, they had only talked about Shar; how bright she was, how frustrating. They shared a common passion. Nidra sometimes went out to Devon’s townhouse for a couple of hours three times a week now, usually after seven, when Asia was ready for bed and Shar was home for the night.
Nidra’s agreement with Devon was firm: he could pick her up if he waited at the curb, but he had to take her straight to his place. The sex was great, like breathing again, but that was all it ever would be. She was a married woman, and she had to sort out her family when Karl came back. Besides, dating had never led her anywhere except where she was.
Gawd, Mom, what do you SEE in him? Sharlene had wailed last night, and Nidra understood her point. Devon had braces at forty-five. He said he would wear the braces for “only” nine months, as if people in their forties had months to spare. Nidra was ten years younger than Devon, but his braces made her feel like his mother. He also had a weak chin and small frame. And Nidra loathed math, which she had yet to confess. But none of that mattered.
Devon was parked in his usual place, across the street in front of their neighbor’s house. When she climbed in, she wondered if Karl had felt as free as she did.
“Shar saw you drop me off last night,” Nidra said.
Devon’s hand lingered on the gearshift. “Meaning?”
“I need to start meeting you at your place.”
The car almost trembled with his relief. They both knew she was looking for an excuse to remind him she was married. Even if she signed the paperwork and took the payout, certification from the Georgia Highway Patrol couldn’t change what would happen when Karl came home. How happy their daughters would be to see him. The light it would bring to Asia.
“I think this part makes it harder for her,” Devon said. “The hiding.”
“She’s making a C in your class,” Nidra said. “You’re not her favorite person.”
“You want me to raise her grade?” He sounded scandalized. “Because then I would have to sleep with every other kid’s mother, and I don’t think I have the stamina.” He winked at her.
Nidra barked a laugh so loud that she covered her mouth. She felt a foreign, giddy impulse to lean over and kiss him. No kissing was another one of her rules.
Devon grew serious. “If the grade bothers her, she should stop gliding and engage. It’s locus theorems, parallel lines, transformations. The rules don’t change. She knows all of this.”
Sharlene had screamed hateful things at Nidra last night—terrible words with claws, leaving them both gasping and sobbing. Thank goodness Asia had slept through it all.
“We fight about it,” Nidra said, “so after tonight, I’ll drive myself.”
The silence was an escape for the first who grabbed the chance. Neither of them did.
“We need to stop at the corner market,” Devon said. “I have a mango emergency.”
Nidra had never known anyone else with mango emergencies. Devon had lived in the U.S. since he was fifteen, but Trinidad survived in his habits and his carefully modulated lilt.
“All right,” Nidra said. “But just a hot minute.”
Nidra didn’t want to be seen in public with Devon, but she was a stranger at World Foods. The market was closer than Publix or Kroger, but the lighting was dim, the aisles were poorly marked, and she had trouble finding even simple foods. The store bustled with sure-footed Koreans, Jamaicans, Taiwanese, Mexicans, Cubans, and others like Devon looking for flavors of home. Nidra didn’t recognize most of the fruit in the produce section. The rows were stuffed with odd shapes and colors, misshapen. Who ate this angry red fruit shaped like a banana? Whose worlds bore these fruits?
Devon took forever choosing his mangoes, clucking over them like baby chicks. He bagged his ripened fruit one by one, careful not to bruise them. That done, he moved to dried dates. They were nearly as large as figs, mutants.
When Devon spoke to her, his voice was so low that she might have imagined it.
“Sharlene is worried about her sister.”
Nidra’s stomach dropped. The floor dropped. The lighting seemed to brighten, then dim.
“She told you that?”
“Not me,” Devon said. “But she talks to her friends, and they say she’s deathly worried. Her sister is very ill, they say, and she isn’t getting proper care. That’s what she’s telling them.”
His voice was mere breath. So, so gentle a voice for such impaling words. Devon patted her hand and moved away to knot his produce bags. They did not talk about Asia’s illness: that was the first rule, the reason for the other rules. They did not talk about Asia, and they did not talk about Karl.
“I’ll wait in the car,” Nidra said.
Alone, she spent two minutes crying, two minutes drying her face and eyes. Devon opened his car door just as she snapped her purse shut.
“Do you still want to come with me?” Devon said.
Nidra shook her head. “Take me back, please.”
Devon’s anxiousness to find the right words filled the car with pained silence. “Nidra . . . ”
“I left mac and cheese for Shar and Asia in my fridge,” she said. “We can whip something together at my place.”
Devon considered and nodded. Without a word, he drove her home.
“Eww,” Shar said when she saw Devon in the living room. She froze mid-step on the staircase, her face puckered. With her hair cut short, she looked like a willowy version of Karl; Nidra saw the resemblance most when Shar frowned. “What’s Mr. Roy doing here?”
“Good to see you too, Sharlene.”
“It’s Shar,” she said. “In my house, you call me Shar. And you can go now.”
“Shar, don’t,” Nidra said. Her spontaneous plan had felt foolish as soon as she opened her door—indecent, really—but Shar had started downstairs before she could tell Devon she’d changed her mind. Shar stood halfway down the stairs, knuckles tight on the railing, undecided.
When Nidra saw the living room through Devon’s eyes, everything was crooked: the books, the rug, the sofa cushions, the photo frames. Everything.
“Did Asia finish her homework?” Nidra said.
Shar stared at Nidra with what looked like real loathing. “Yes, Mother. Anything else?”
“Are you done with yours?” Devon muttered, and Shar’s eyes shot lasers at him.
“Yes, there’s something else,” Nidra said. “Devon’s having dinner with us tonight. That all right with you?” She tried to sound casual. Like she wasn’t begging.
Shar’s lips shrank, tightening. “Is it all right if my arch-nemesis Mr. Roy, my geometry teacher drone, has dinner with us here in our house? At our table?”
“Yes, Shar. Is it all right?”
Shar still hadn’t moved from the stairs. Nidra braced for the storm, in front of company this time. None came. “Your life,” Shar said. “But he’s a royal pain.”
“Only during daylight hours,” Devon said. “After dark, my true personality emerges.”
He picked up the Christmas portrait Nidra and the girls had taken at Sears last year at her parents’ insistence, their smiles so forced they looked manic.
“I’m sorry, Shar,” Nidra said. “Hiding doesn’t feel right. You said to stop pretending.”
“It’s nothing at all to you,” Devon told Shar. “You’re any other student, and your mother and I are friends.”
Shar shrugged and went to the kitchen to get the dinner plates. Shar used to hide in her room to avoid her chores, but she never needed reminding since Karl left.
“Asia?” Nidra called upstairs.
“Right here, Mom.”
The voice came from the stairs, but hung weightless in the corner shadows. Then, just that fast, Asia was midway down the stairs in a long black T-shirt. Asia’s skin was the color of the stained teak-colored paneling on the wall behind her. Light from the foyer lamp shimmered, making her face seem to phase in and out against the wood’s grains, like an optical illusion.
When Devon drew a hitched breath, Nidra realized she’d been holding her own since she heard Right here, Mom from thin air.
“Well,” Devon said, sunshine in his voice. “It’s good to meet you, Asia. Your mother has told me a great deal about you.”
A lie, but a forgivable one for the way it made Asia’s teeth gleam with a smile.
“This is my friend, Mr. Roy. He’s—”
“I know,” Asia said. “I heard.”
Nidra served the macaroni and cheese as they sat at the table. Devon silently said grace before he ate, a habit she had never noticed. Could it be they had never eaten together? She remembered the sound of his lungs hissing when he’d seen Asia.
Why had everyone seen how sick Asia was but her?
“My daddy’s vanished,” Asia said to Devon.
Quickly, Nidra patted Asia’s hand. “That’s just what the police told us. We don’t know.”
Shar’s stare was so pointed that Nidra had to fight to hold her daughter’s eyes.
“He’s not coming back,” Shar told Asia, an assurance, as if Nidra were a stranger who had just said something profane. Her stare held, daring Nidra to dispute her.
“No,” Nidra said. “Probably not.”
Packed molecules in the air seemed to drift clear of each other, making it easier to breathe. Karl would want them to have the insurance money. Both of the girls needed new jackets instead of the old ones she’d had to dig out of the coat closet. It was only late November, but it was cold.
Maybe Karl’s truck had skidded in icy rain. Maybe that was how it had happened. He’d been on his way home. Maybe his last thoughts on this Earth had been of them.
“How do you like school?” Devon asked Asia.
Asia shook her head. “I hate it. Everybody looks at me because I’m sick.”
Nidra tried to keep the panic she felt from her face.
“Yes, that’s very rude,” she heard Devon say somewhere far beneath her. “It was that way for me, too, when my parents first moved us from my country. I was in a private school where no one had brown skin but me. They all stared. I ignored it.”
“Yeah, screw them,” Shar said.
“Who wants dessert?” Devon said, pulling out a produce bag.
Shar peered into the bag and blanched. “Do you know what those look like?”
“They’re dates,” he said.
Karl didn’t like dates, so Nidra had gotten out of the habit of buying them by the time the Shar was old enough to eat them. She could hardly remember who she had been when she was twenty, dropping out of Georgia State and marrying Karl because he had plans and made her laugh. Two months later, she was pregnant with Sharlene. Eight years after Sharlene, Asia. A life lived in a blur.
“I don’t think they’ve ever tasted dates,” Nidra said.
Devon cast Nidra a playful look. “Why are you depriving these girls?”
While Devon helped Asia choose the plumpest date, Shar peered over to study them.
“I’ll try one,” Shar said.
Asia squealed when she took her first bite. “It’s so sweet! Like cake.” She ate three more. She had a good appetite. Watching the fruit find Asia’s mouth, Nidra remembered the bubbles in Asia’s baby bottle when she drank, the way their dance had quieted Nidra’s worries when Asia was small.
“Well?” Nidra said, watching Sharlene wrap her date pit in her napkin.
“It’s okay.” Shar scooted out her chair. “It’s time for Asia’s bath.”
“I’ll take her up in a minute.”
Shar stood and reached for Asia’s hand the way she would at a busy intersection. “It’s a school night, so the sooner the better. Come on, Asia.”
After the polite good-nights, Devon watched as they walked away.
“You’re so lucky,” Devon said once he was alone at the table with Nidra.
“Which part?”
Devon slipped his hand over hers on the tabletop.
“Sharlene is such a big help to you,” he said. “You have a lovely family.”
The bathtub was full, the water crowned with bright white suds.
When Asia was two and Karl got a bonus at work, they’d used most of the check to refurbish the main bathroom upstairs. The floor, wall tiles, and bathtub were slick aquamarine, the color of the bathroom in her grandmother’s house. The picture window overlooking the backyard was the biggest luxury of her lifetime.
Neighbors’ lights twinkled in the dark like constellations. When the treetops were a full canopy, they never saw lights at night. Now, even in the darkness, her backyard trees’ steady shedding unmasked the lighted construction site down the hill: bare concrete walls half finished, machinery painted brightly in unnatural colors. She’d stopped noticing the view when it was pretty, and now it was gone. She could never catch hold of a moment.
Karl’s good razor hung suspended in the toothbrush rack, coated with dust and powdery shaving cream residue. Nidra took the razor and almost put it in the drawer, but she buried it in her front pocket instead. It would still smell like his face.
“Asia?” Nidra called into the hall.
“I’m right here.”
A splash echoed behind Nidra, from the bathtub. Suds parted at the foot of the tub as Asia sat up, a watery shadow against bathwater the color of the ocean. The bubbles clinging to Asia’s hair and face framed her features. Nidra couldn’t believe how pale Asia was since her last bath. Her bare skin was nearly invisible.
She would call Dr. Ross as soon as Asia was in bed. Nidra knew his cell phone number by heart. She wondered at her calm, but knew she was not calm anywhere except on the outside.
“You were hiding,” Nidra said.
Asia giggled. “If I was a snake, I woulda bit you,” she said, imitating Grandma.
Nidra sat on the rim of the tub and dunked Asia’s washcloth into the warm water. “Here comes the snake,” she said, slithering the cloth beneath the suds toward Asia’s back. Asia pretended to scream, splashing to the other side of the tub. Nidra wanted to ask why Asia never told her she wasn’t feeling well again, but she didn’t have to. She probably had tried to say it, or expected Nidra to notice. She was Asia’s mother, after all. A mother should see it first, not last.
Water splashed again, and a stream trickled from Asia’s fingers. Asia played with the water for a long time. Nidra ran Dr. Ross’s telephone number through her head, sixes and threes.
“After your bath, you pick a story and I’ll read it to you,” Nidra said.
“Anansi, then.”
However small, it was a plan. No mysteries or new tragedies waited in the next thirty minutes. A maw gnawing inside Nidra’s stomach felt like a scream from her heart and womb, but Nidra enjoyed the sound of Asia splashing in the water, playing unafraid.
“Look, Mom,” Asia said in a hush, entranced. “I’m vanishing.”
Crystalline threads twined Asia’s fingers, blending her skin to the color of blue bathwater where her fading flesh rose and fell, rose and fell, across the liquid plane.
Throughout my writing career, I have sought ways to convey the feelings and images of death and dying as my own coping mechanism. This story, first written in the wake of my mother’s death in 2012, has never before been published.
I am still trying to understand how our loved ones can simply disappear.