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When We Disappear
a novel by
Lise Haines
Unbridled Books
This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are either the
product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance
to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events,
or locales is entirely coincidental.
Unbridled Books
Copyright © 2018 by Lise Haines
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Haines, Lise, author.
Title: When we disappear / by Lise Haines.
Description: Lakewood, CO : Unbridled Books, [2018] |
Identifiers: LCCN 2017038279 (print) | LCCN 2017042748 (ebook) | ISBN
9781609531485 () | ISBN 9781609531478 (trade pbk. edition : alk. paper)
Classification: LCC PS3608.A545 (ebook) | LCC PS3608.A545 W48 2018 (print) |
DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017038279
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Book Design by SH – CV
First Printing
One should really use the camera as though tomorrow
you’d be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an
enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have
only touched it, just touched it.
Dorothea Lange
You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior
dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to
infinity, which is the number of grains of sand.
Jorge Luis Borges
In memory of
Norton Kay
My father, my friend,
my heart, my guide
Mona
He shut off our alarm clocks, loaded his car, eased the hand brake out, and backed down the drive without turning the engine over. Richard, my father, was probably in Indiana by now. He had tossed his house keys on the counter as if he wouldn’t be back. An envelope was propped on the kitchen table with a letter written to Liz, my mother.
“He didn’t wake you? To say goodbye?” I looked through the blinds to see for myself that his car was gone.
His coffee cup stained the table, sugar sprinkled across it, wet spoon stuck back in the box.
“No, I guess he …” She stopped when she opened the letter and began to read.
Next to the envelope was a coffee-table book, National Monuments Across America, filled with glossy color prints of Yosemite, Bryce, the Giant Sequoias, Niagara Falls. There were several Ansel Adams’ black-and-whites. I used to pore over that book as if I were looking at shrines. We had talked about visiting monuments in one long vacation when I was young. He left the book open, weighing down the pages with our green carnival-glass salt and pepper shakers. Maybe that’s how he was able to leave, thinking he’d return before long and someone would take that trip with him. My mother and I looked at the photograph of a herd of bison running across both pages, from left to right up to the edge of the paper like the edge of a cliff.
I tried to read the letter over her shoulder but she pulled it to her chest. Mom was in her mid-forties then, ran most days, drank little, never smoked. Now there were lines around her mouth I hadn’t noticed before. Her eyes appeared smaller, as if they had sunk into her skull overnight.
The year was 2007. I was seventeen and Lola was three. Our plan had been to get up in time to see him off. She would have been fast asleep in Mom’s arms at that hour. No one slept as soundly as Lola. Mom would have said goodbye for Lola, swaying her from side to side on her hip. I would have stood there for my mother’s sake.
My eyes began to water, and the bison looked smaller, more like lemmings.
Folding the letter, she put it in the pocket of her robe. “He’ll call when he gets to New Jersey.”
“You aren’t going to tell me what he said?” My voice began to strain, as if I had started running to catch up with his car.
“He had a hard time saying goodbye.”
“You’ll have to tell Lola.”
“You aren’t breathing right,” she said.
“I’m fine.”
“Hold on.”
We had a drawer stacked with lunch bags.
When I was breathing in and out, filling and collapsing one of the bags, she said, “We’ll go to the Art Institute today. We have a month left on our membership.”
This was her solution to most things: lose yourself in art. But I couldn’t afford to take off because my father had taken off. I was in high school, finishing the first semester of my senior year. I had three finals coming up.
“We’ll show Lola the Thorne Rooms,” she went on, in her spirit of repair.
Each of the museum’s miniature rooms was decorated in a different period and style from the thirteenth century to the 1930s, the furnishings on a one-inch to one-foot scale. Everything was perfect, yet no one lived in any of those rooms. Or from the other side, the curator’s side, everyone who peered inside was a giant and all of their imperfections showed. Mom had taken me there many times when I was Lola’s age.
Once I was breathing normally, I said, “Maybe next weekend.”
My mother held me and kissed my cheek. “Come upstairs if you need me.”
Then she went off to turn on the shower in the master bath. Here she would break down. I walked in on her doing this once. She sat on the lid of the toilet, weeping under the sound of the shower, as if none of us would find out.
While I listened to the water run upstairs, I wondered if things might have been different if I had woken early and found him at the kitchen table, pen in hand, about to sign his name to the bottom of that letter. Maybe he would have gotten past the sadness of leaving her to leave her the right way.
Though I had stopped listening to his stories years ago, I would have listened to this one, even pulling a chair up to the table and turning off my phone. He would have started with a man taking off from the people he loved in difficult times, using great care in the way he invented this man, the look in his eyes, his rumpled clothes. Dad was an impeccable dresser then, so this last detail would have been his effort to set himself apart from the man he conjured. After a while Richard would have reached into his suit pocket to give me the handkerchief that was laundered and pressed for the road, trying to make me feel that things were going to be all right. This idea would have lingered in the light penetrating the blinds. But once he was gone, it would have dropped to the linoleum and left a mark as if a heavy jar had landed there.
The thing I couldn’t say to my mother was this: Lola was too little to be left, and Mom wasn’t fragile exactly—I never saw her as someone who would crack—but she was unprepared. And I really had no idea what he expected me to do about any of this.
I listened to the familiar thump in the pipes as the water was shut off upstairs. I went into my room. There I curled up and fell back to sleep, the only place where I knew how to cry openly.