The Vanishing Year (12 page)

I open my wallet to pay the tab, and the heat crawls up the back of my neck, flushing my face. My credit card is gone.

•  •  •

“That reporter, he returned your wallet, yes?”

We have finished eating, one remaining small sliver of venison on a ceramic platter between us. The pine farmhouse table is littered with supper castoffs: half-empty wine and whiskey glasses, crumpled linen napkins. The dining room is dimly lit by flickering tapers and I am sleepy drunk. I have all but forgotten the missing credit card and I blink twice instead of answering him.

When I arrived home Henry called the bank immediately, shrugging it off with only a nebulous murmur of admonishment. When he hung up, he rubbed my back, between my shoulder blades. “You probably just left it at the diner. I'll leave you cash.” He patted my head. Instead of being grateful, I swatted Henry's hand away. It was all so patronizing.

It's a blessing and a curse, having someone like Henry. On one hand, I could sit and drink a glass of wine, let him sweep in on his white horse, wave his giant hands, and fix it all with his booming voice. Take his cash, tuck it into the satin folds of my purse with a demure smile, as though I were a kept woman. On the other hand, lately, I'm tired of simply letting things happen.

“Cash? Yes, he brought it back.” I cross and uncross my legs.

“Interesting.” Henry taps his fork against his plate, a quiet
ting
in the silent room. The silence up here, hovering on the top of this mountain, kills me.

“You think he took it?” I'm incredulous. That had never crossed my mind.

Henry shrugs. “I'd have no idea, Zoe. We don't know the man.”

“Well, I know him a little. He doesn't seem like a thief. He's a reporter.”

“Ah yes, an honorable bunch.” He pulls his mouth down into an ironic frown that also seems almost like a grin. “It's
just something to think about, that's all. That man, he's around a lot when all these . . . things seem to be happening.”

The bottle of table red has worked a number on me. I've drunk the bottle alone while Henry nursed a glass of Pomerol he brought up from the cellar. Henry leans back in his chair, his lips lifted at the corners. His hair uncharacteristically mussed, flopping down over one eye. He looks boyish. Henry never looks boyish.

He holds up one finger, like he's forgotten something. He pushes himself up and comes around to my side of the table. He perches one leg up, smoothly sliding my dinner plate to the side. From his pants pocket, he retrieves a small velvet box and sets it gently in front of me with a wry smile. On top of the box sits a small card, no envelope. I flip it open.

As you are woman, so be lovely:

As you are lovely, so be various,

Merciful as constant, constant as various.

So be mine, as I yours for ever.

“Henry.” I can't stop the smile, it's all so unlike him. “Poetry? Did you write this?”

“Of course not. It's part of a Robert Graves poem. I've always loved it.”

He touches his finger to his lips, his thumb poised under his chin, and gives me a look of reflection. I open the lid and nestled inside the pink velvet folds is a bracelet. The chain is intricately braided yellow and white gold and it sparkles in the candlelight. At first blush, I think it is a charm bracelet, which seems uncharacteristically trendy of Henry, and I give him a questioning look. The chain threads through three beads. I unclasp the hooks on either end and delicately hold the jewelry in my palm.

“It's pretty,” I say, feeling like I probably don't understand
the significance. I'm not lying, it
is
pretty. It's just not Henry's style: too simple, too trendy. It's more
my
style. Then again, Henry is often thoughtful in ways I am not.

I study the beads. The first one is engraved with a small, squat tree, its branches reaching up and wrapping around the gold. The etching is delicate and fine, and the detail takes my breath away. The second bead is carved with a simple flower, what looks to be a gladiolus. The third bead contains a set of wings, each feather intricately scored.

“Very beautiful.” I nod my head, as though I understand it.

Henry watches me with amusement, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “Oh stop. I'm not fooled. I can read you, you know.”

“Well then explain it.” I laugh.

He fastens the bracelet around my wrist, his hair tickles my cheek. “I had these made. The tree is because you give me roots. I want to do the same for you. The tree is actually a bonsai. The Japanese believe that when left in nature the bonsai grows wild and unruly and ugly. That only when carefully cultivated by people is it beautiful.”

“Am I the bonsai?” I have always felt like Henry's pet project, to some extent Lydia wasn't far off. I've been groomed to fit into his life, among his friends and colleagues.

He laughs and kisses my nose. “I am the bonsai, Zoe. Without you, I am an angry, singly driven man. A man with one purpose. I become one of those loveless rich men. I become Krable.”

I lean back and study Henry as he speaks. It's surprising how well vulnerability suits him. It's the sexiest thing he's ever worn.

“Go on.” I tilt my head.

“The wings are easier to explain.” He touches the bead on the end, his thumb massages my palm. “I'm sorry. I have no desire to hold you back. I fell in love with your grit. These
past few months I've been afraid of losing you. I've clipped you too much and I'm sorry.”

“We're both . . . damaged.” I run my index fingernail over the veins in the top of his hand, his smooth large-knuckled hands. I love his hands.

He clears his throat and holds the center bead between his thumb and index finger, his hands cool on my wrist. “The middle bead is a gladiolus.”

“The flower of infatuation.” My voice hitches.

“Yes, technically ‘love at first sight.' Which is us, don't you think?” He stands up, tugs on my hands until I stand with him. “It's also a symbol of character and strength. It reminded me of you.” He steps back, rubs his forehead and gives me a sideways smile.

“It's beautiful, Henry.” Which is clichéd and stupid but I'm speechless.

“I want you to go back to the flower shop. I'm saying it's okay.” He tugs on my hand, leading me away from the table, through the living room, and up the wood steps. I follow him, swaying slightly, tilting my wrist in the moonlit living room to get a closer look at the bracelet. I can't believe he'd thought of all that, and I have no idea when he'd had it made. It means more to me than all the diamonds and rubies in our safe.

Without warning, the want creeps up on me. I gently push on the small of his back, down the hall and into our bedroom, where I shove him, wanton and drunk, onto the bed. We pull at each other's clothes, and I am laughing. The room spins, and the next morning when I try to remember the moment, all I can see is Henry's smile, the love reflected in his blue eyes, and the overwhelming feeling that, here in this secluded country, despite all his flaws and our imperfections, where I know not another soul, I am home.

CHAPTER
12

On Saturday, I'm up at six, brewing coffee in a stainless steel percolator, standing at the gas stove, watching coffee gurgle and spit into the glass top. I can't sleep. In our penthouse apartment, we hear very little street noise, so I can't figure out the difference. But I had lain in bed, my leg jittering, shifting one way, then the other, before I finally snuck out and downstairs.

Arms snake around my middle and I jump. “You scared me.” I smile, my head tipped down, and Henry plants a feather kiss on the back of my neck.

“Ah, sorry,” he whispers in the dark kitchen. “Don't be mad, but I have to drive back for a few hours.”

“Today?” I step forward, putting distance between us.

“I'm sorry. It's going to be overcast, but not rainy. You could hike out back, there are trails. They're not all ours, but no one cares. Just don't get killed by a hunter.”

“What season is it?” I wonder.

He rubs his jaw. “Spring turkey maybe? I'm not sure. I generally hunt in the fall. Spring is too busy with work.”

I don't understand Henry's work or his hunting. It's com
pletely possible, likely even, that I don't understand Henry. I pour us two cups of coffee in pottery mugs, but as I turn to retrieve the cream and sugar (for mine only, Henry drinks his coffee black), Henry's eyebrows pucker, his mouth twisting apologetically.

“You have to go now,” I say, flat as stone, and sigh. I pick up his mug and pour the coffee into the carafe. He drops a kiss on my lips and lingers there, his hand pressed between my shoulder blades.

“Don't pout. I'll be back right after lunch. I just have to address some unexpected . . . issues.”

“Issues with what?” I'm curious now. What are the issues on a Saturday if you work on Wall Street?

“Zoe, do you know how boring my job is?”

“No, tell me. Put me back to sleep, and I'll sleep till you come back.”

He laughs and the sound swallows me. I love it and miss it all at once. “Okay, fine. So Japan's market is not actually closed on Saturday, and we have a security issue with the agency bonds.”

“Okay, okay. I feel like you just made all that up. Go.” I give his arm a gentle shove and he laughs again. I think it's possible that this house, this town, has let out a new Henry, like he's been unzipped. I picture him stepping out of his own skin, clapping his hands together, looking around.
Okay, what do we do first? Fish? Hunt? Hike?

He kisses his fingertips and touches them to the crown of my head and I hear his shoes clack on the hardwood floor and the door click shut, and
just like that
I'm alone. I'm not necessarily afraid, but I have a pit settled right under my breastbone. I'm at loose ends. It's hard to have a whole day in front of you and nothing to put in it, nothing to pencil in, no phone calls to make. I have this feeling often but generally I can fill my time by going out, taking in Manhattan. In New
York, you're never bored. I look at the clock above the sink. Six-thirty.

I part the curtains.
Out
leads to a forest in the back and a copse of trees in the front, then a quarter mile away, a road. I take my mug and from the back of the easy chair in the living room, I grab a sweater that I assume must be Henry's but I don't recognize it. It's heavy and cable knit, its sleeves are long, with big wooden buttons. I wrap it around myself tightly and open the back door.

The deck is wide and spans the back of the house, looking out to a sea of black and green. In the corner is a single rocker, made of rough-hewn logs, a deliberate attempt to look woodsy. I curl into it, bring my knees to my chest and cup my coffee. It's cold for April, I doubt today will be a day for exploring the outdoors. It smells like wet pine.

I'm reminded of Lake Tahoe. Evelyn had nabbed a cabin once, a gift from a friend. She had a million gifts from friends. She didn't have any money, but always said she had a lot of friends, and some of those friends had money. She'd come home with steaks that she'd gotten as a gift, or wine she “found.” All trinkets that people gave her, she claimed. She'd explain it away with a wave of her hand, and a soft tinkling laugh.
You can get anything you want if you're nice to people. People like to do things for people, it's so easy to be kind.
She dragged me to Tahoe, where the rich vacation, she'd said.
We'll be queens for a week!
My seventeen-year-old heart had nearly broken at the idea of a week without television and very little phone communication. I dragged my feet, I huffed and puffed,
whatever
-ing my way through half the trip. Sneaking calls to friends when Evelyn wasn't looking.

Evelyn never faltered, her grin bright, coral lipstick smudged on her two front teeth when she smiled, which was all the time. It's easy to glorify the dead and say things like that: Oh, they glowed, they were always happy. With Evelyn,
it was true. Any attitude I threw at her that week, it's like she caught it all with Jergens-soft hands and never stumbled.

She unmoored the boat, a ramshackle rowboat that I insisted would sink (
So what,
she'd scoffed.
We can swim, right?)
and paddled us out into the middle of the lake with one oar, one side, then the other. Her cheeks had grown bright red and I thought she might pass out. I'd rolled my eyes and took the paddle from her,
Don't die, Ev.
And her arms had looked so thin. It was the first time I'd realized she'd grown so incredibly tiny.

“God, Evelyn, you're a stick. Eat a sandwich or something.” I knew I was being mean, but it would be so embarrassing to have an anorexic mother, like one of the fainting cheerleaders at school. She leaned over the side of the boat and swatted a handful of water at me. I took the oar and with a sweeping motion, drenched her. She laughed, but it sounded like it came from inside a barrel.

She looked away and when she looked back, she bared her teeth. “Do I have lipstick?” For the first time, she didn't. We'd made it back to the cabin, where we blasted Billie Holiday and simmered vodka sauce, and she let me drink wine until the edges of the room blurred. She got me to talk about boys, or who I thought were men at the time.
Don't be afraid of sex. Be afraid of love, but not sex. Love can swallow you whole, consume you, change you, but sex? Sex is just for a night.
And I had no idea what she meant.

Later, I heard her on the phone in her room. I stood in the hallway of that cabin and I swore she was crying. I pushed against her bedroom door but couldn't hear the words.

She was sick then, and it was only after she'd died that I realized she'd known it.

A thought nags at me, one I'd asked Mick, filled with hate and anger. If she had so many friends, where were they? When she died, where'd they go? No one called. No one offered to
pay for a simple cremation. I'd stayed in her apartment for weeks after her death, that foggy milky time before I ran, but never once did the phone ring unless a bill collector was on the other end. I search my memory for who Evelyn said was the cabin's rightful owner and come up empty.

The sky has lightened to a dove gray and the rain mists all around, not falling in drops from the sky, but like it's raining from the bottom up. My coffee cup is empty and I'm cold. I venture inside and look at the clock. It's not even nine. I wander upstairs halfheartedly, to find my book buried under sweaters and jeans in my overnight bag. All the doors in the hall are closed and I nudge open the one next to our bedroom. The bed in the center is made simply and a hand-stitched brightly colored patchwork quilt adorns the bed. The pillows are made from old jeans pockets and the walls are adorned with red wooden stars, an upmarket Americana theme. I am sure of two things: Penny decorated this room, not Henry. And nothing has changed since Tara died. Upon closer inspection, the bureau top contains bottles of women's perfume, turned yellow in the sun. The nightstand holds a mystery book with page 137 folded down at the corner. There are blue peep-toe bedroom slippers (Chanel makes bedroom slippers?) peeking out from under the bed. She could have been here yesterday. Then there is the dawning realization that there's not the slightest layer of dust on anything. It's not as though this room has been closed off, never to be entered again. Someone cleans this room. Rearranges the perfume bottles,
just so.
Moves the slippers to vacuum, and replaces them so that their toes line up perfectly underneath the dust ruffle.

My arms are pricked with gooseflesh. I back out of the room and close the door, my hand paused over the doorknob. I am at once anxious to leave and glued to the spot. My desire to know more about the woman Henry was married to
battles some unknown restraining force. I try to pinpoint it and can't, but suspect I fear measuring up. It's hard enough to keep pace with an ex-wife when the relationship was permitted to slide downward on its own. But I suspect Tara was ripped from Henry's arms at the peak of his adoration, and yet I still bumble along somewhere in the middle. It's a hard thing to know, that you're second.

I leave the room and turn to examine the other two rooms. The door at the end of the hall is Henry's office. The door between what I've so quickly come to think of as
Tara's room
and his office is padlocked. Padlocked? I halfheartedly give the doorknob a good jimmy but unsurprisingly, it doesn't move. I do the same to Henry's office and am startled to realize that that door doesn't open either. It's been locked from the inside.

My phone buzzes from inside my pocket and a text from Cash blinks.
Give me a call ASAP. I sent you an email.
I check my service and see that there's no data—only one unsteady bar of network service. When I open the web browser, the loading circle spins around and around. I jam my phone back in my pocket.
Stupid in-the-middle-of-nowhere-land.
The house doesn't have wireless but I vaguely remember Henry assuring me his office computer had Internet access. I jimmy the handle again for good measure. I pull my phone back out and dial Henry. It rings four times and goes to voicemail.
Henry, it's me. Where's the key to your office door and why is it locked? I want to use the Internet. Call me back.

There's only one reason that Cash would be calling me, and it has to do with my birth mother. I'm sure he's found something, and my heart pounds. I clatter down the steps and dig through the kitchen drawers until I unearth a screwdriver.

Back upstairs, I stick the screwdriver through the old-­fashioned keyhole and wiggle it around until I feel it catch
the lock. It takes me a few minutes but after the third try, the mechanism clicks backward and the handle gives. I pause, with my hand on the door. I've never been in Henry's office before, and now I'm doing this without his permission.

The office smells of the one leather chair, with a faint overtone of sawdust. Henry's desk is a simple Quaker-style table with a single middle drawer—so unlike his offices at home and work, which boast rich mahogany and more drawers and cabinets than he could possibly fill. The house was his family's, and I wonder if this was his father's office. Later, I'll ask him, when he's properly plied with whiskey. He's said very little about his parents and I scan the room for signs of them. Nothing.

I pull out the chair and sit, hitting the power button on the computer. The desktop is a surprisingly old Mac, nothing at all like the sleek silver laptops Henry carts around, always the newest, smallest model. I briefly wonder if the office is even his. I wonder what Tara did for a living.

I'm surprised but grateful that the computer doesn't prompt me for a password to log on. I click the Internet icon and it takes a minute, but it chugs to my email site. I call Cash back.

“Hi, it's me. I'm at a computer, what's up?” I'm breathless and I realize my fingers are shaking.

“Hey, hold on.” He covers the phone and I hear voices and then scratching like he's got the phone in his pocket. After a minute or so, he comes back. “Okay. Did you check your email?”

“Yeah, it's open.”

“I sent you a link. Click on it.”

I do and it brings me to a genealogy-tracing website with Evelyn at the top of the page. Her picture knocks the wind out of me. Her smile is bright. She looks
so young.
I don't realize I'm crying until a tear hits my forearm. I sniff.

“Are you okay?” Cash asks. I realize I've been quiet too long.

“I'm fine. But what is this? How do they have her picture?”

“She must have made a profile. When was this picture from?”

I study it and realize that based on her weight, she was probably already sick, maybe in her first remission. “Maybe six or seven years ago? She was already sick.”

“Okay, scroll down until you see the name Janice Reeves.” He's clicking in the background. I do what he says. “Do you see the names under her?”

“Gail, Belinda, Caroline,” I say out loud. Then again, “Caroline.”

“It's a hunch, not a fact yet. I wanted your feedback.” He talks quickly, the words piling out in a rush.

“But the name on the birth certificate is Carolyn. With a
y
. And the last name is . . . Seever.”

“Remember how I said no one makes up a truly fake name?”

I can't breathe. “Cash . . . is this really her? Were they cousins?”

“I don't know. There's no picture. You have to create a profile to get a picture. But Zoe, I sent you another link.”

I click back to my email and click on the second link. I don't prepare myself, I don't think about it, I just click. And when the page opens, the room tilts.

“Oh my God, Cash.” It's a Facebook page, a woman staring defiantly into the camera, with a twisted mouth, a coy smile, daring the world. Her eyes are twinkling, that pale, translucent blue that I recognize. Her hair is dark and unruly in spots, glossy in others, and I bet she has a hell of a time finding good product for it. Her nose is straight with an identifiable ridge and her left eyebrow shoots up noticeably higher than her right.