Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

“Are you comfortable?” she asked.

“Very,” I said.

She smiled.

I smiled.

I noticed the video recorder on a tripod.

“Is that on?” I asked.

“It can be,” she said.

“But it’s not currently on,” I said. I wanted no more recordings of me that I could not control.

“Not currently,” she said. She turned it on to demonstrate. She turned it off.

“See?” she said. “I do, however, prefer to videotape my clients. It’s a process thing with me. Also a legal thing.”

“Maybe we can work up to it,” I said.

She flipped through my Workshop medical file, sent to her by Professor Yuen.

“Do you mind if I ask what you do?” I said.

“Do?” she said. “Didn’t Karen tell you?”

Professor Yuen had not.

She handed me a business card that read PATRICIA WARD, SPIRITUAL MIDWIFERY.

“I’m not pregnant,” I said, trying to return the card. Patricia did not accept it.

“I’m a spiritual midwife,” she said. “Primarily I birth stillborn emotions, the fetal remnants of bad pasts. But sometimes I help people birth their true self from within. Sometimes the person you are now is the mother to the future you.”

A tiny mobile device rang on her side table. She picked it up, glanced at the screen.

“Excuse me for a moment,” she said. She texted with her thumbnails.

“Thank you for your time,” I said. “I don’t think spiritual midwifery is for me.”

Extricating myself from the Barcelona chair required me to roll to my right side, lift my ass in the air, push to a standing position. Among the countless hostile design elements of the Barcelona chair, it featured no armrests. These fucking chairs .

I straightened my legs. A wave of nausea knocked me back down.

(I tried not to get too excited about this; a stomach flu had been making the rounds.)

Patricia replaced her phone on her desk.

“There!” she said. “Do you need some water? You’re green.”

“No water,” I said. “I just need to go home.”

“You know what Robert Frost wrote,” she said, opening a door to a half bath. “ ‘Home is where, when you go there, they have to let you in.’ ”

Water battered a tiny basin.

“The cheap platitudes of art,” she said. “Home is the oven where you stick your scared little head.”

She reappeared with a Dixie cup.

“Then again,” she said, waving my file, “when the home teems with emotional vermin, sometimes it’s best to return and hire an exterminator.”

“That would be you?” I asked.

She flipped her glasses into her hair.

“Your mother,” she said.

“My mother is the exterminator?”

“No,” Patricia said. “Your mother is the gift. Your stillborn gift. Death is a gift to some people. Death was a gift to your mother. But is death a gift to you? It might be, if you can’t give birth to this dead baby mother. But my point: you have options.”

The urge to vomit tsunami-rushed my esophagus. I tamped it back.

She flicked on the video camera.

“Tell me about her,” she said.

I stared into the camera’s eye, determined to give it nothing.

“She’s dead,” I said.

“But not really,” Patricia said.

“Yes, really,” I said.

“She lives in you,” Patricia said. “Decomposing in you. Poisoning you. Attacking you.”

I flashed to that rainy afternoon in the Carpathians, and my encounter with the wolf that had peripherally revealed a dark-haired woman.

“Attacking you,” Patricia repeated. “And yet you blame innocent people for your illness. Why? Because she’s your mother. She would never do anything to hurt you. She doesn’t even know you. A person so uninterested in you couldn’t be the cause of your sickness. In order to want to hurt you, a person has to care.”

“Fuck you,” I said.

“Consider it,” she said. “Consider how you’ve brought this on yourself.”

“I’m leaving,” I said.

“The sick are never blameless,” Patricia called after me. “Remember that when you stick the pistol in your mouth.”

I stumbled toward the front door. Why would my mother attack me? Neglect was one thing, but targeted hostility? Then I heard in my head —you’re the hostile one . And maybe I was. Maybe what I’d interpreted as her inattention, she’d interpreted as mine. And wasn’t it true? My search for her had never been a search for her; I’d been searching to feel what I knew I should, by biological rights, feel, but couldn’t. Grief, basically, or a variety of grief — one that didn’t involve missing a person, one that was far more self-involved. A grief over a grief.

I made it as far as the road before vomiting. I did so discreetly, behind a tree. Afterward I covered the vomit with dirt. Because I was polite even when incapacitated, I thought. Because I was such a decent person that I didn’t want to inconvenience anyone, not even Patricia Ward. But as I scuffed the dirt over my vomit, my patch of shame, I felt less like a highly evolved human than a dying animal, covering its tracks so that it could expire with dignity under a rock, alone.

Toward the end of September, I received an e-mail from Colophon. He’d landed at a university in Lyon, a yearlong scholar-in-residence position at their film studies department, a sinecure he seemed to find beneath him.

He included a link at the bottom of his message. No explanation.

I didn’t follow the link, and soon forgot about it. I had a faculty meeting that day. That night I was hosting a student party at my apartment and I’d been tasked to find eclectic bitters for my volunteer mixologist, a scholarly alcoholic named Klaus.

The following day, I was busy being hungover, a state of self-induced illness I’d been experimenting with more and more. My father and Blanche arrived that afternoon for a weekend visit, the two of them in a throbbing marital huff. That night we ate dinner at a French inn-restaurant. After the wine arrived, my father handed me a skinny box.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“I found it,” he said.

“He didn’t find it,” Blanche said.

My father glanced at her stonily.

“What?” Blanche said. “You didn’t find it.”

“It was mailed to me,” he said.

“By whom?” I asked.

“It arrived in the mail after you moved back to East Warwick,” Blanche said. “No return address.”

I opened the box.

Inside was the pendant made by my mother, purchased by Varga, stolen by Irenke, returned to Varga. The surfaces had a molten rumple to them, like metal just pulled from the forge.

“Your mother made it,” Blanche announced. “See? Ugly.”

Each sinew furled to a menacing point. I pushed against one with my fingertip. Hard. I didn’t break the skin. But I could have.

It was as hostile an object as I’d ever touched, and yet I experienced with it an instant kinship. Despite the long line of tragic women who’d owned it, it seemed to have always belonged to no one but me.

I slipped my head through the chain. The pendant hung to my navel, and was so heavy it pulled on my shoulders, dragging me downward. I closed my eyes and imagined: this is what it felt like to be her, or to be around her, or both.

“Was she always unhappy?” I asked.

“Depression ran in her family,” Blanche assured me.

“I could never tell if she was happy or unhappy,” my father said. “I suppose that says something not very flattering about me.”

My father stared into his wineglass.

“She was emotionally remote and impossible to read,” Blanche, the old dog, said.