The Vanishing Year (8 page)

Me with my hair spiked like, well, a bat orchid, and dyed just as black. With my facial piercings and my fishnet stockings and knee-high boots. With my too-short skirts and my dubious taste in music. My suspect circle of friends, acquaintances mostly, Lydia's friends. But most of them not so arrow straight, some who dabble in drugs. I've heard his colleagues say things, seen their looks. They smirk when they think I'm not looking—but I see it. I'm a dangerous hobby, an expensive yacht. I'm a midlife crisis. He's slumming and getting off on it. I see it, they see it. Henry doesn't. I tell him this and he just shakes his head.

“You don't know me. I've never followed a crowd in my life.” So, he takes me. He takes all of it, never faltering. Absorbing Lydia's sarcasm and attitude, her jealousy, with a resonant laugh and twinkling blue eyes. That subtle dimple, that only appears when he's most amused. The way he pinches my chin. The way I can put on a show, all seductive kitten, and make him late for a meeting, a meeting he was running no less, just by using a whispered kiss of a voice. He rushes home, taking me in the hallway, unable to wait. He thought about it all day, he says.

I have no idea what to make of any of it. Slowly, I fall. I fall until I'm down at the bottom of the barrel so deep in love with those twinkling eyes and those dimples. I'm drunk on my own power and his power and his money and the world he holds, all for me. He offers it in one hand, without pretense, while holding his heart in the other. I want both, I take both. I let myself go, I stop pointing out that his friends and his colleagues laugh at me. I stop saying no. I stop protesting his indulgence, when he buys me clothing and shoes and
jewelry. I stop looking for the catch. There doesn't seem to be one. So what do you do?

He rents out Brûlée, where we met, and fills it with flowers from Elisa's. In that back room, he gets down on one knee and delivers a speech that ends any doubt. He wants me for me, he claims. I don't believe it, but he repeats again and again:
You wanted me to woo you. So here I am.
It's all so hard to argue with. I say yes, crying and blubbering. Everyone wants to be loved for who they are, even if we keep our true selves locked up and hidden. It's a nice little fantasy to believe that the right person holds the key and all the things you do not say are just somehow, magically, known.

I justified it then: keeping Hilary a secret. I suppose I justify it now. It's been so long. I'm Zoe now, what does it matter? There are parts of my life I'd like to never think about again, even when it seems like all I do is actively avoid thinking about them. Evelyn, a barbaric burial. Rosie, abused, exploited. Those little pink nails, all those suburban moms, reaching for me, petting my hands. Wanting what I could offer, but never wanting me.

Then comes our wedding, small and private. His friends excluded, mostly because
I think
I'm not acceptable. He says no, insists it's a bad time of year. Everyone summers in the Hamptons. Our honeymoon. Lavish: a world tour. Two months, maybe longer. All love and sex and sharing ice cream, giggling, drinking champagne. My ship finally came in—at some point, Evelyn always said, everyone's does. We stroll the Gran Vía in Madrid, eat gelato, throw coins over our shoulders into the Trevi Fountain in Rome, spend hours in the modern art museum in Geneva. We spend months together, never tiring of each other. He hangs on my every word. Caters to my whims.

It's so easy to fall in love with Henry Whittaker: his easy smile, his lifestyle, his profligate praise and unabating inter
est, his strong, capable hands and the way they caress my body. He offers what I've been so desperate for: a root. He offers money, which I've never had; security, so long missing. He fills the gaps that Evelyn created when she left me alone at night in a tiny apartment, in a bad section of town, to go to work, or on a date, but either way, not there to soothe my fears, push the wet hair off my perspiring forehead at three a.m. when I'd heard gunshots or had yet another nightmare. He offers me love, a boundless amount of it, as though everything I say amuses him or entertains him and as though he understands
exactly
what I mean. We watch documentaries on National Geographic and I test him by saying ridiculous things like,
Do you think elephants are the communists of the animal kingdom?
He offers me recognition, where I'd often only felt isolation, trying on different identities: college girl, druggie, punk hipster. He offers me all this on a shiny, silver serving tray.

One might wonder, as I often did, what exactly could I offer Henry Whittaker?

CHAPTER
8

Lately, no matter what I am doing—going to CARE meetings, attending lunches—I find myself scanning the crowd for women who look like me: dark hair streaked naturally with mahogany and pale blue eyes the color of pool water. The sales clerk at Blush's Boutique
has a lovely sprinkling of freckles across her cheeks, youthful for her age, in a recognizable pattern, and I study her until she shifts uncomfortably, averting her eyes and self-consciously patting her short, stiff hair back into place. Maybe she always called me
dear
for a reason.

I repeat
I am being ridiculous
like a mantra as I stomp around the apartment. But I can't help it. I'm restless and bored and can't shake the thoughts rattling around in my brain.

A large hall closet houses stacks of crates that contain remnants of our life before each other. I once asked Henry to show me his, his memories with Tara, his circle of friends—I saw once, quickly, some photos of beautiful people in tailored clothing on the back of a yacht, a picture-perfect ad for champagne or an investment firm. He always said
some other time
, with a casual shrug. The pictures were squirreled away. I've mostly given up.

In the back of this closet is my box. Singular. Pink-and-black striped, an old humongous hatbox holds all the remnants of my old self, and even my old-old self. I've been so many people I can barely keep track and this singular crazy-looking container is all I have to show for it. The top is dusty and I lift it, letting the bottom fall back onto my bed in protest. Inside is paperwork, old and new, yellowed and dog-eared. There isn't much, and most of it was kept for reasons I can't fathom. There's a cable bill from my old apartment with Lydia. Pictures of Lydia and me drinking martinis at clubs, hazy with smoke, laughing with men I don't recognize or remember. It's the spontaneity that calls me now. The idea of not knowing where my nights would take me, whose bed I would wake up in, when I would find my way home and how. That my life ever held so much easy adventure amazes me.

I have squirreled away an envelope that used to belong to Hilary. I was never supposed to keep it. I was advised to get rid of
everything
that could link me to my old identity by Detective Maslow, a kind but harried man with haphazard glasses and too long hair. He never looked like a violent crimes detective to me. He wasn't grizzled; he wasn't hard-boiled. He looked like an exhausted tax accountant.

In the beginning, his wife called once while I was in his office. I was under the impression she called often. At the time, I was terrified, living in a halfway house, no identity, no name to speak of. That murky middle time before I became Zoe. Hilary ceased to exist the moment I signed the affidavit, but deciding to become Zoe took some time.
We can protect you,
he said. I pressed my back against the chair—I remember it was leather, too rich for a city office, and cracked black—while Maslow sternly explained in detail all I would need to surrender, which was everything.

When he picked up the phone, he lowered his tone to a sniveling murmur with a series of
yes dears
. I realized Milton
Maslow didn't have the conviction to protect me. I wondered how many
me
s
there were, how many men, women, children he had vowed to shield, sitting behind his desk, buried in the paperwork of forgotten identities. No thank you, very much. I'd manage on my own. I testified at the grand jury a mere ten days later. I packed in the middle of the night and I ran. I took the money they gave me, the money that was meant to start me off in witness protection, a mere thousand dollars. I bought a bus ticket with cash to New York, the only place I could think of where I could hide in plain sight. Plus it was as far away from California as a person could get. I left my dingy hotel room in the middle of the night and left Milton Maslow bumbling around in his office. I felt only a little bad, so I left him a note.
Thanks for everything. Bright lights, big city.
He could puzzle it out.

I pick up a thick manila envelope now and peel away the tape. I haven't looked inside it in at least five years. Inside is a single picture of Hilary, hair dyed with streaks of blonde, a big wide-open smile, a happy college girl. A California girl. I wonder who she would have become, if she hadn't become me? I can't deny it's complicated.

I sift through photos of Evelyn. Beautiful, nurturing, gentle. My memories of her are tinted pink and soft around the edges. Even the lean years. After she got sick and couldn't work and I wore jeans until my ankles stuck out. She thinned down to nothing, smaller than me, a child in an adult bed, but by then I'd turned eighteen. I studied her pictures. I'd saved three. One of her holding me as an infant, my father beaming behind her, the man who died before I could remember him, a slick road, a careening car, an ill-placed tree. I think. Hard to remember, I was so young when he died. All I have is Evelyn's voice telling whispered stories under the blankets with the lights off.

I was wanted, she said. I've never doubted it, which I
hear is a strange thing. I've read articles on the psychology of adoption and never connected with any of them. Evelyn's ovaries “dried up and plain stopped working,” she told me, a predecessor to the ovarian cancer that would later take her life. But she'd twist her wrist with a tinkling laugh, “They call infertility a curse. Was the best thing that ever happened to us. We got you.”

The second picture is Evelyn and me at the beach. I was maybe fourteen and we are hugging and smiling. I never went through that all too common phase, when teenagers hate their mothers. I could never imagine my life without her. Until, of course, I had to.

The third picture is after she got sick. Our last picture together, her head wrapped in one of her paisley scarves, her hair wispy fine underneath. She's grinning wildly into the camera, with her hands on my face. I'm not smiling, but studying her, like at any moment she might
poof
be gone, and I'd have only that moment to have memorized her face.

Evelyn lived her life in full force. She rejected all things mediocre, preferring only to spectacularly succeed or fail. She'd always said that she didn't quite do things right, but she didn't do them half-assed either, so when she failed, she did so
with enthusiasm.
Her advice to me, always, win or lose, do it enthusiastically.

I feel my eyes well up, and for the first time in a long time missing her fills me up, and I'm crying. I shove the pictures back in the envelope and ungracefully wipe my nose on my sleeve, which even
Henry's wife
can do when alone.

I thumb through the rest, quickly, until I find what I'm looking for. It's a yellowed copy of a birth certificate with the name of a hospital—Griffin Hospital, Derby, Connecticut—on the top. The father line is unsigned, a blank reminder that I belong to no one. The mother line, a haphazardly scrawled
Carolyn Seever
. The date is there, May 3, 1985. And my birth
name is there. The first person I ever was before I became someone else. I run my finger along the raised letters.
Zoe Griffin.
Evelyn told me the nurses named me Zoe, after one of their favorite patients. Griffin came from the hospital name.

After my biological mother gave birth, she left me in the nursery. Sometimes I feel as though I am made up almost entirely of secrets, but the one that no other living soul knows is that I took my name back. Before there was Hilary, there was the baby Zoe, abandoned in a Connecticut hospital. After there was Hilary, there was a grown-up Zoe, living in an ivory tower. Sometimes I wonder how all three of us can possibly fit in this one body.

Haphazardly, I shove all the remaining papers back into the box and replace the lid. I hold on to the birth certificate and a folded-up memo from a defunct adoption agency that is fairly useless. The name on the birth certificate is a dead end, a false identity she'd left in a panic—I know this much from my last search effort.

I tip the box on its side and place it back in the corner, behind Henry's things. I see
Tara
scrawled in pen on the side of one of the crates and I can't help it, I lift the lid. I've seen it before, of course. But yet, I've never snooped. I don't know why I snoop now. Inside sits stacks of folders, insurance, trust account, taxes labeled with the year. I thumb through them quickly; it's all very dry. Underneath the folders is a frame and my heart skips. I've never seen a picture of her, isn't that odd? Not one single photo of Henry's wife, his precious
Tara.
I have no idea what she looks like, other than one drunken night when I had the nerve to ask Henry. He got this faraway look and murmured
beautiful.
I've been curious, and I grab it.

The photo is taken from behind; her head is turned. I can barely make out her profile. Her hair is loose in waves down her back, but covered with a wispy white veil. It is of their
wedding day and the jealousy surges, this awful, clawing, clamping tightness in my throat. Her dress is fitted, she's impossibly thin, elegant in an ivory fishtail gown. I shove the frame back under the files. I back out of the closet, the bile in my throat. I push sideways the idea of being threatened by a swatch of bare spine and a mane of thick hair.

With the birth certificate and the adoption agency memo in one hand, I call Cash. He picks up before the phone even rings.

“Hi, it's Zoe. I was following up about the story? If you finished it?”

He pauses. “Yeah, mostly. I had a few other questions. Would you want to meet for lunch?”

I agree, but suggest a coffee shop closer to my apartment than his office. Neither one of us suggests the diner and the conversation is stilted. He asks if I'm okay.

I feign surprise. “I'm fine!” I say brightly. We agree to meet at noon. I check my watch and it's ten after ten.

I tuck paperwork into my purse, folded into a square small enough to fit in the pocket. I feel guilty, lying to Henry. Honestly, I'm not even sure what I'm doing yet. The lie feels good, fits like a well-made winter coat.

I step out into the sun and the air is brisk. It smells woodsy out, that faint promise of summer. I skip-step to the curb to hail a taxi and change my mind. I walk the six blocks and before I realize it, I turn west.

Henry works out every day at 11:30. Five miles on the treadmill, a hundred push-ups, a hundred sit-ups, exactly one hour, not including the shower. His gym is across the street from his office, and I stand in front of it, hopping from one foot to the other. I've never surprised him like this; Henry doesn't particularly care for surprises (his words,
I don't particularly care for surprises).

Sometimes I think about the Henry who
wooed
me,
buoyant and boyish, and I remember that
he
liked surprises. I can't tell if I've been conned or if all relationships slow to the everyday, if marriages settle and become mundane at some point. To some extent, everyone puts on a show, their best foot forward, smiling at hobbies they hate, pretending to love football teams they couldn't care less about, or eating sushi and secretly spitting it into a napkin.

I hover in front of the door. I'm not even sure I can get in the building without a membership badge, which I don't have. He's never asked me to join him. I'm still trying to figure out why I'm here when a group of two men and two women barge through the doors, talking and laughing. I scoot behind them and let the mirrored doors close behind me.

The lobby is austere with mirrored walls, floors, ceilings, white and black countertops, and a single twenty-foot tree stretching up to the ceiling. I follow the group down the hall and skirt away before I reach the locker room. At the end of the hall is another entrance into one of the main gyms, and the last twenty feet of hallway is a one-way mirror, presumably for prospective clients to view the amenities without current members feeling put on display.

My mouth goes dry and I involuntarily place my hand against the wall, the heat from my fingertips leaving condensation prints against the cold glass. Henry is in there, his movements quick and smooth, his back muscles flexing with each up and down. Push-ups are last, he's close to done. If he makes a move toward the lobby or toward the locker room, I'll reveal myself as a pleasant surprise. Maybe blow Cash off and grab a middle of the week lunch with Henry.

He stands up and gulps water and I watch him lean in, whisper to a coltish blonde on the mat next to him. She throws her head back, as though he's said something hilarious, which I know could never be true because Henry is not funny. At least, not recently. But something about him
is different to me: he's loose-jointed, almost swaggering, a hand poised cockily on one jutted hip. I lean forward until my nose is almost touching the glass. Henry cracks another joke and the blonde swats at his arm. He reaches out and pats her bottom, her round, perfect pink-spandexed bottom and hovers there, his fingers gently flexing on the rounded swell.

The heat flushes my face and I back away from the window. Men flirt, it's how it is. I still feel dizzy and I push the heel of my palm to my forehead.

With my head down, I scuttle through the lobby.

“Ma'am!” The receptionist calls but I flip my hand up in her direction and push out the front door. In the time I've been inside the club, cloud cover has rolled in, cloaking the sky in thick gray cotton. The cool breeze brings gooseflesh to my arms.

Henry wouldn't be unfaithful, I know that. Simple flirting, that's all it is. Men need their egos tended to, it's practically biological. I hush my panic with Henry's words.
He worships me.
Breathe in, breathe out. I wonder what he's said to her. He hasn't joked with me in a long time, or made me laugh like that. Like a protective reflex, my brain soothes me, hands me snapshots. Recent memories: Henry gently caressing my cheek at the benefit as we danced. His hands on my bare waist in bed, his low murmurs,
God, you're so beautiful.
These are not things men say and do to women they do not love. Passionately.
Passionately.
The word gets caught on my tongue.