How to Disappear (23 page)

We live in a house on the edge of the woods, the yard running down to Green Lake on one side, merging with forest on the other. Coyotes could eat Gertie if she got outside by herself. An owl could.

I whistle for her again, but there’s still nothing. Just wind
and the slap of branches against the roof, creaking under their own weight, shedding pine needles like raindrops.

It’s already the worst day ever. I’m stuck in my room. I’m not losing my dog.

I tell him how I headed down toward the lake, toward the shed where Gertie likes to go poking around, but she’s not there.

Behind the shed, I see a beam of light by the trail that winds past the edge of our property to the lake. I trot toward it along the lakeshore and between the trees. Like a moth so stupid that her whole species is about to be wiped out by survival of the fittest.

The moth that spreads her white wings against the porch light and fries.

The girl who follows a beam of light into the woods.

There is a body in the woods, wrapped in a yellow blanket. The arm, the hand, the chipped blue nail polish. Two men dragging her along, Steve illuminating their way with a flashlight.

Disbelief.

All the eight-by-twelve glossies of father-daughter dances, the years of posing with the fireplace stockings for Christmas cards, the scrapbooks that jump from holiday to holiday, are sucked through a shredder.

The shovel is raised higher when they see me. Steve’s shouting. I’m frozen. The blow to the head. My fingers pressed around the handle of the knife they toss into the grave.

My fingerprints buried with the dead blue fingernails.

Darkness. The wind. The sound of water lapping at the edge of Green Lake.

“We have to get rid of her.”

Steve says, “Not to worry. It’s done.”

I’m on my back in the shed. Smelling fertilizer. My head resting against the metal prongs of a rake, hips and shoulders hurting as if I’d been dropped from a height in this exact position. Pain behind my eyes that’s almost worse than seeing what I saw.

Almost.

“You’re going to handle this?”

Steve says, “We’ve been doing business for a long time. I’ll do what has to be done. It’s taken care of. Go!”

“You’re sure? It’s your kid.”

Steve says, “It’s not my kid. It never was my kid. Go! Maybe she was cute when she was eight, but she turned herself into a useless whore. Some mornings, I can’t stand to look at her. Believe me, it’s nothing.”

I’m the it.

The it that’s not his kid.

The it that’s done, the useless whore, the it that’s taken care of.

The it that has to be killed.

“She’s out cold. I’ll walk you to your car.”

The voices fade into the wind.

I tell him I know what Steve does for a living. I do.

I file things for him in the home office.

I’m not an idiot. I know he does taxes for people named Yeager. People who do a whole lot of business in Colombia. People who, when you google them, you figure out they didn’t actually make that much money importing extra virgin olive oil and exporting scrap metal because
there isn’t that much olive oil or scrap metal on earth.

But I thought he loved me.

I thought I was his little girl. Like his daughter. His kid.

I thought he’d do anything for me.

Not
to
me.

I say how I rolled onto my side in the shed, crouched, stood, squeezed out under the board loosened by years of hide-and-seek, and took off along the shore.

Hid in a tree house.

Climbed onto a truck.

I thought things were bad, but they’re worse than I thought. I was supposed to kill a
witness
—not a killer, but the witness to the killing. She knows squat about Karl Yeager’s business.

Does Don know?
“She might know things,”
he said. Yes, he knew, and yes, I’m stupid. Don winds me up, gets to me with some story about Karl Yeager—whose name is enough to make people shit their pants—and once he’s got me good and scared, he sends me off to kill an innocent as ordered by Esteban Mendes, a stepfather who eats his young. And being Don, he throws our mom into the mix for good measure. Or Mendes does.

For Nicolette, it’s even worse. Her
dad
is gunning for her? Her dad is the top of a pyramid, and Don’s in the ooze at the bottom,
calling the shots for his dupe brother: me. I am the murder technician for Esteban Mendes.

“Why didn’t you walk into a police station?”

She says, “Why didn’t
you
?”

“The truth—because if Karl Yeager says your family is dead if you don’t do him a favor . . . Come on, you looked him up. . . .”

The truth is, I rejected the possibility of telling the FBI, the Nevada police, and the fire department that didn’t investigate obvious arson at the outset. Telling didn’t figure into the equation when Don was handing me my marching orders, or when I was driving home, or when my house had smoke pouring out of it, my mother regaling me with the fairy tale about the spontaneous combustion of smoke detector batteries.

Telling anyone was too risky, too messy, too counterproductive, a death sentence . . . for
me
, not for Nicolette.

No, I went off to solve the fucking problem, to find Nicolette. And if the whole point was to warn her, why didn’t I?

Because I’m Jack Manx.

The truth is tearing at me like a detonated land mine. I’m the guy who didn’t consider the normal possibilities because the normal course of action wasn’t even a road in my twisted yellow wood. And this, Mr. Berger, proves that taking the
much
less traveled road can be a bad thing.

I say, “They would have believed you.”

She kicks the back of my seat. “Blame
me
, why don’t you?”

Turns out, there are five police officers in Cotter’s Mill, Ohio, and
four of them shoot geese with Mendes—geese, and maybe sitting ducks.

My dad avoided police, crossed the street, drove in the other direction. But Cotter’s Mill is a backwater town in Ohio, and if she believes Mendes owns the police department, what do I know? You could fill Lake Tahoe with the nothing I know. They might not hurt a kid outright, but how normal would it be for police to return a runaway girl to her dear old dad? Ignore her wild stories? Scoop her into the squad car and drop her off at home?

“Is that good enough?” she spits at me from the backseat. “Because maybe it was binge watching
In Plain Sight
on TV, where every single protected witness gets shot at. Maybe telling the police my fingerprints were on the knife because someone else put them there seemed like a bad idea.”

“Baby—”

“I’m not your baby, J. Jack. Whoever.”

“Do you want to come in the front seat?”

“Why? So you can grab the gun?”

I take a deep breath and blow the air out through my mouth. “The only reason I want the gun is so you don’t shoot me with it.”

We drive in silence until we’re almost all the way out of the foothills, driving west toward the coast, back to civilization.

I switch on the radio.

“Turn it off.”

Then she says, “You swear you thought it was Yeager sending you out after me?
Swear
no one said one word to you about Steve.”

“That’s how it happened. Don said Mendes had nothing to do with it. He said it was Yeager. He knew hearing ‘Yeager’ would scare me. And it made sense it was him.”

What doesn’t make sense is that I went along with it.

I hear her fingernails drumming on something hard—the seat belt buckle, I hope. Then she says, “God, you believe anything.”

I wish I could see her face. She’s probably sorry I ever came to.

I say, “You’re lucky it’s not Yeager. Once he starts, he won’t stop until he’s dead—or you are. He’s relentless. His brother’s wife divorces his brother, she marries a dentist, his brother remarries, everybody’s happy. Three years later, she disappears. She’s gone. She’s never heard from again.”

She says, “Stop! I get you thought it was Yeager.”

“That whole Yeager clan is a bunch of rabid pit bulls.”

“I get it! All Yeagers suck. Fine.”

And then there’s absolute silence. This goes on for miles as we swing through what would be farm country if there were water. The headache she gave me when she clobbered me could be classified as blinding if I didn’t have to see well enough to drive.

I whisper, “Are you asleep?”

“You wish.”

After a long time, Nicolette says, “You’re in deep shit, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.” When I think about the deep shit I’m in—beyond Don, beyond my mother, beyond the guys in my apartment and whoever set our laundry room at home on fire—I can’t believe I let this happen.

I’m Art Manx’s kid. Law enforcement has preconceived notions about me. They find reason to search my trunk when I drive, stone sober, through a sobriety checkpoint off the Strip. And now Nicolette can tell them how I chased her with a loaded gun. No one will believe that I was planning to convince her to come with me to Guyana or some other unspecified location I never revealed to her before she had a gun on me.

I say, “More like quicksand. Unless you want to run away with me.”

Nicolette laughs, but not her fun laugh. “Sure. That’s definitely on. Argentina. As if that was a thing.”

“It would save us both a lot of grief. There’s cash in the trunk.”

“You’re
so
full of yourself! I already tried disappearing—you think you’d be so much better at it? I’m tired of disappearing. I’m done.”

I say, “What’s your alternative? You hand me over to the police and go back to being a target? I was never going to hurt you.”

“Liar! You
know
you had a plan!”

“My plan was to stage it. We’d get to the crest, and I’d explain to you.”

“At gunpoint?”

“The plan was for you to believe me. Give me a bloody shoe for Don. And then we could take off.”

“What if I didn’t want to take off with you?”

Admittedly, I didn’t have that part of the equation mapped out. “I’d give you cash? You could hide better with cash, admit it.”

“So I was going to leave with your money. What were you
going to do? Like, if somebody checked to see if you actually killed me.”

“I don’t know!” This is the frustrating, embarrassing truth. “Rat out Don? Kill my mom?”

“
Kill
your—”

“It’s a figure of speech. When I rat out Don, it’s going to break her heart.”

“Your brother said it was her or me?”

“And me. There was an element of self-interest.”

“If you think you can charm me by being slightly honest, you can’t.”

I want to charm her, but I don’t know how.

I really am fucked.

Everything’s different from what I thought. I was hiding from the wrong thing. I had the wrong plan.

This is where I make a better plan.

The plan where I stop paying for things I mostly didn’t even do, and everybody else who did terrible things starts paying up.

Big time.

Jack is lucky.

All he has to do is help me out, and maybe I’ll let him out of this. Maybe? Who am I kidding? I will. All I can think about is whether I gave him a concussion, and how bad that is, and if I should make him drive us to an urgent care center somewhere in this burned-out brown landscape so a doctor can check him out.

I wish he’d say something. Such as apologizing more. But
he’s just driving along like a law-abiding maniac at thirty-five miles per hour.

I just want to hurry up and get out of here.

At least Ohio is green. This place looks like it just had a forest fire. Jack says people consider this golden. I consider it a wasteland that I’m leaving.

I hate the West.

I like Ohio. I liked my life. I want it back.

I’m done with rolling with the punches.

Finished.

Despite all the credit that you get for rolling.

How resilient you are.

How you land on your feet.

How you’re slightly screwed up and require counseling and have no judgment whatsoever, but you’re rolling with those punches. Good girl. Steal nail polish and roll, roll, roll.

I’m tired of going along with every damn thing with slight, girly rebellion that doesn’t actually change anything. Just reminds you that you’re a private with no say in Fate’s army.

So, Nicky, we’re moving to Ohio where I’m marrying this man you’ve never even met named Steeeeve, and we’re going to be soooo happy. Fine.

So, Nicky, she’s gone, she’s looking down on you from heaven, and here’s this tooootally nice guy you’ve known for six months, Steve, and he’s going to be your dad. Don’t look back. Look forward. Fine.

So, Nicky, smile or nobody will like you. Be fun, only not so fun you’re reckless, not so reckless you worry your nice dad, and if he’s going to be that worried, sneak out. Fine.

So, Nicky, you need a 3.3 or Steve will be pissed and you won’t get into college with Olivia and everyone will think you’re an idiot and you won’t get a smart boyfriend. Fine.

Only don’t get too upset when your smart boyfriend, Connor, that you love and adore, is sleeping with every other cute girl with a 3.3 in Cotter’s Mill because, hey, you’re only kids.

Don’t be so upset you decide to get even with him with the next guy.

Only the next random guy you think is your new boyfriend is so not your boyfriend. Big U of M college guy and his stupid muscle car and his stupid SOG SEAL knife he shows off all the time. You think the sun rises over his left shoulder, but he’s only standing there to eclipse the light. You’re the idiot who doesn’t get that hooking up with the devil is bad news. Until it’s too late.