Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

She showed me a photo of a woman in an ivory ski ensemble standing in front of a gondola at Gstaad, her hair a blue-ish auburn that winged to the sides as though attached to wires.

“That’s her?” I said. “You’re prettier. Not that it’s a competition or anything,” I hastened to add. But it was true. Alwyn’s beauty came and went depending on how much sleep she’d had, or how much water she’d drunk, or how many people she’d annoyed that day, and this made a person want to keep examining her face because it was never the same.

“She doesn’t look like a woman whose daughter has vanished,” Alwyn said. “Though what that would look like, I can’t say. I only know it’s not that.”

She finger-jabbed the page, creasing her mother backward at the knees.

“She still hasn’t flown to Cincinnati to see my film,” Alwyn said. “Has she?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Has she?”

Alwyn scrutinized me.

“Just testing,” she said. “I wanted to make sure you were obeying the rules. No psychic activity.”

That wasn’t the only reason she’d asked. She was deeply bothered by her mother’s and stepfather’s failure to see her vanishing film. (I wanted to assure her: on this front we did have something in common.) I recalled the crying woman at the Regnor panel and her comment about library books that remained unread for decades. Alwyn and I, by committing our absences to film, had become objects whose neglect could be quantified.

“You’re lucky you’re being attacked,” Alwyn sulked. “Someone cares a lot about you.”

“Your mother cares about you,” I said. “She hired a detective.”

“Mmmm.”

“She probably wants to make sure that you’re not in any trouble or danger,” I said.

Alwyn laughed.

“If you’d had a mother,” she said, “you’d understand what a forgiving interpretation of motive that is.”

“I had a mother,” I said. “But I was spared the rite of passage of hating her.”

“Which is exactly your problem,” Alwyn said.

“Maybe more of a matter of inexperience than a problem,” I said.

“Hate is a form of emotional attachment,” she said. “You’re denying yourself the only maternal bond available to you. This is your weakness, in my opinion. This is why you’re being attacked.”

“Because I don’t hate my mother?” I said.

“Like it’s so outlandish,” Alwyn said. “What kind of woman would kill herself when she had a month-old baby? I’m sorry, but that’s monstrous.”

I picked up my liver tea. I drank what, for me, counted as a lethal dose.

“It’s not monstrous,” I said. “It’s fucking tragic.”

“I suppose you’re one of those people who feel worse for Sylvia Plath than for her two children,” she said.

This was true.

“I don’t understand how a woman could do such a thing,” Alwyn said. “I don’t understand it at all.”

“Maybe that’s your problem,” I said coldly. “Thinking it can be understood.”

Two weeks after my arrival at the Goergen, I received irrefutable proof that I was getting better. Or maybe it was proof that the pills I’d been taking in New York had been cleansed from my system thanks to the liver tea and the colonics to which I’d been subjected, and the bookbinding hobby I’d picked up, maybe too the Mundane Egg visualizations I did every day with Marta, even though I always left her office feeling dirty and ashamed.

Regardless of the cause, after more than a year of psychic blindness, I was able again to see.

On my fourteenth night at the Goergen, Helena, a plastic surgery patient from Budapest, blustered into the dining hall.

“My engagement ring is gone!” she announced. Her left hand spasmed above her head, lacking the ballast of the very large diamond she’d made certain we noticed, rattling the gem against table surfaces when she ate, her hand otherwise seemingly paralyzed by its amazing shackle, the fingers slack, the palm upturned, as though awaiting something — a kiss, a nail.

Perhaps I was reading too much into her. Borka had told me: Helena was not a lucky girl (“girl” employed by Borka as an emotional category — Helena was in her fifties). This engagement would be Helena’s fourth marriage; her previous husbands had left her, two of them had beaten her. But on the plus side, said Borka, she’d started out as a secretary, and very poor, so at least she’d married her way to money.

“It’s not all ditch water,” Borka said.

An orderly hurried Helena into a chair and urged cold compresses upon her. Helena’s three-day-old face-lift was in the delicate stage; intense emotions were contraindicated. A man in a white suit took notes while the rest of us hovered. Her ring, Helena told us, had been stolen from her locker while she soaked in the thermal baths.

“I’ll post a reward,” Helena said to us, the silently gathered. “To whomever finds the thief, I shall express my gratitude in a manner known as handsome.”

I heard her tell another plastic surgery patient that she’d lost the engagement ring her first husband had given her, too. “Though it was impossible not to lose that ring,” Helena confided. “The diamond was the size of a lentil!”

Back at our table, Borka and I gossiped.

“It probably fell down a drain,” I said of the ring. The Goergen featured an unnerving number of drains, not only in the showers or puncturing the walkways between the thermal baths but in rooms usually immune to deluges — mine, for example. I’d found a drain underneath my bed, implying that the room would be hosed out once I left, my various residues cleansed. Maybe the drain was regulation. Who knew. I tried not to think about it. Whenever I lay on my bed, I repeated in my head this sentence: I am contaminating the scene. I am contaminating the scene .

“It is for the best that she not marry this man,” Borka said.

“She’s still going to marry him, I’d imagine,” I said.

Borka appeared traumatized by this suggestion.

“She cannot,” she said. “A lost engagement ring means the marriage cannot happen.”

Borka drew a finger across her throat.

“If she marries him she’ll die?” I said.

“Maybe only the living kind of dying,” Borka said. In the Hungarian countryside, she informed me, people believed in the existence of beneficent meddlers who broke up bad marriages before they happened. In ancient times this was accomplished by the destruction of the dowry, for example the disappearance of a herd of livestock.

“But of course it is just a folktale to allow for the theft of jewelry and sheep,” she said.

“My mother lost her engagement ring,” I said.

Borka was unimpressed, much as she’d been when I’d told her that my mother was dead. I’d come to expect such reactions: she was slightly autistic, Borka was, but aware enough to know that she should respond differently. As a result, these confessions of mine made her tense; she seemed to register them as a rebuke.

“And she persisted in marrying my father,” I said, trying to apply a happy spin, also to assure her — I expected her to be nobody other than who she was.

“Indeed,” Borka said. “And look what happened to her.”

“Well …” I said.

“When a woman is enchanted by unhappiness, there’s little that anyone, even a beneficent meddler, can do to dissuade her,” she said.

“I thought you said the beneficent meddlers didn’t exist,” I said.

“I said they were probably thieves,” she replied, her tone embittered for reasons I couldn’t connect to the loss of rings.