But now, with this new question, she seemed to have regained speed. She stared at me, a fierce look on her face (her eyes gripping my eyes, not letting go), a look that reminded me of Dad; as he combed supplemental textbooks on Rebellion and Foreign Affairs in order to find that bright bloom of evidence that, when transplanted into his lecture, would have the capacity to stun, to intimidate, make the “little shits melt in their seats, leaving them mere stains on the carpet,” he often sported this militant look, making his features look so hard, I felt if I was blind and had to run my hand over his face to recognize him, he’d feel like a bit of stone wall.
“They’re missing persons,” Hannah said. “They fall through those ubiquitous cracks, in the ceiling, on the floor. Runaways, orphans, they’re kidnapped, killed — they vanish from public record. After a year, the police stop looking. They leave behind nothing but a name, and even that’s forgotten in the end. ‘Last seen in the evening hours of November 8, 1982, as she was completing her shift at an Arby’s in Richmond, Virginia. She drove away in a blue 1988 Mazda 626, which was later found abandoned on the side of the road, in what was possibly a staged accident.’”
She fell silent, lost in memory. Certain memories were like that — swamps, bogs, pits — and while most people avoided these muggy, unmapped, wholly uninhabited recollections (wisely understanding they were liable to disappear in them forever), Hannah seemed to have taken the risk and tiptoed into one of hers. Her gaze had fallen, lifeless, to the floor. Her bent head eclipsed the lamp and a thin ribbon of light clung to her profile.
“Who are you talking about?” I asked as gently as I could. Noah Fishpost, MD, in his captivating book on the adventures of modern psychiatry, Meditations on Andromeda (2001), mentioned one had to proceed as unobtrusively as possible when questioning a patient, because truth and secrets were cranes, dazzling in size yet notoriously shy and wary; if one made too much noise, they’d disappear into the sky, never to be seen again.
She shook her head. “No — I used to collect them as a girl. I’d memorize the listings. I could recite hundreds of them. ‘The fourteen-year-old girl disappeared on October 19, 1994, when she was walking home from school. She was last seen at a pay telephone booth between 2:30 and 2:45 on the corner of Lennox and Hill.’ ‘Last seen by her family in their residence in Cedar Springs, Colorado. At approximately 3:00 A.M. a family member noticed the television still on in her bedroom, but she was no longer inside.’”
Goose bumps pinched my arms.
“I think it was why I sought them out,” she said. “Or they sought me — I can’t even remember anymore. I was worried they’d fall through the cracks, too.”
Her gaze finally picked itself up and I saw, with horror, her face was red. There were giant tears looming in her eyes.
“And then there’s you,” she said.
I couldn’t breathe. Run for Larson’s truck, I told myself. Run for the highway, for Mexico, because Mexico was where everyone went when they had to escape (though no one ever got there; they were all killed tragically, mere yards from the border) or if not Mexico, then Hollywood, because Hollywood was where everyone went when they wanted to reinvent themselves and end up a movie star (see The Revenge of Stella Verslanken, Botando, 2001).
“When I saw you in that grocery store back in September, I saw a lonely person.” She didn’t say anything for a moment, just let those words rest there like tired workmen on a curb. “I thought I could help.”
I felt like a wheeze. No — I was a cough, a bed creak, something humiliating, the frayed ruffle on discolored pantaloons. But just as I was going to glue together some childish excuse to run out of her house, never to return (“The most catastrophic thing to befall any man, woman or child is abject pity,” wrote Carol Mahler in the Plum Award — winning Color Doves [1987]) — I glanced over at Hannah and was struck dumb.
Her anger, irk, aggravation — whatever that mood was she’d been mired in since I’d first arrived, when the phone screamed, when she’d sworn me to secrecy, even the apparent melancholy of moments ago — had fizzled. She was now disturbingly peaceful (see “Lake Lucerne,” A Question of Switzerland, Porter, 2000, p. 159).
True, she’d lit yet another cigarette, and smoke tangled out of her fingers. She’d also fluffed her hair and so it swayed one way, then the other across her forehead as if seasick. But her face, rather bluntly, boasted the relieved and somewhat satisfied expression of a person who’d just accomplished something, a harrowing feat; it was a face of slammed-shut textbooks, doors dead bolted, switched-off lights, or else, after a bow, amidst a drizzle of applause, heavy red curtains swinging closed.
Jade’s words slammed into my head: “She’s really the worst actress on the planet. If she was an actress, she wouldn’t even make the B movies. She’d be in the D or the E movies.”
“Anyway,” Hannah went on, “who cares about any of that now — the reasons for things. Don’t think about it. Ten years from now—that’s when you decide. After you’ve taken the world by storm. Are you sleepy?” She asked this quickly and evidently had no interest in my answer because she yawned into her fist, stood up, and stretched in the lazy royal way of her own white Persian cat — Lana or Turner, I wasn’t sure which — who, with a heralding thrash of tail, strolled out of the darkness beneath the piano bench and meowed.
The Sleeping Beauty and Other Fairy Tales
I couldn’t sleep.
Oh, no — now that I was alone in a strange, stiff bed, a pale morning soaking through the curtains, the overhead lamp a giant eye staring down at me, The Histories of the Bluebloods began to creep out of the underbrush like exotic nocturnal animals at nightfall (see “Zorilla,” “Shrew,” “Jerboa,” “Kinkajou” and “Small-Eared Zorro,” Encyclopedia of Living Things, 4th ed.). I had very little experience dealing with Dark Pasts, apart from close readings of Jane Eyre (Brontë, 1847) and Rebecca (Du Maurier, 1938) and though I’d always secretly seen splendor in melancholic chills, ashy circles stamped under the eyes, wasted silence, now, knowing each of them had suffered (if Hannah could be believed), it worried me.
After all, there was Wilson Gnut, the calmly handsome kid I knew at Luton Middle in Luton, Texas, whose father hanged himself on Christmas Eve. Wilson’s own ensuing tragedy had nothing to do with his father, but in the way he was treated at school. People weren’t mean to him — quite the contrary, they were sweet as pie. They held open doors, offered homework to plagiarize, allowed him to cut in line at all water fountains, vending machines and gym uniform distributions. But lurking within their benevolence was the universal understanding that because of his father, a Secret Door had been opened for Wilson, and anything and everything dark and deviant could fly out of it — suicide, sure, but other frightening things too, like Necrophilia, Polyorphantia, Menazoranghia, maybe even Zootosis.
With the quiet precision of Jane Goodall alone at her observation post in a tropical forest of Tanzania, I observed and documented the array of looks elicited in Wilson’s presence by students, parents and faculty alike. There was the Relieved Glance of “Darn Glad I Ain’t You” (after smiling amiably at Wilson, performed covertly to a commiserating third party), the Sorry Look of “He’ll Never Git Over It” (performed to the floor and/or immediate space around Wilson), the Meaningful Gaze of “Kid’ll End Up Crooked as a Dog’s Hind Leg” (performed deep into Wilson’s brown eyes) and the Simple Gawk of the Unbelieving (mouth open, eyes unfocused, overall demeanor near vegetative, performed at Wilson Gnut’s back as he sat quietly at his desk).