Джоанна Скотт - Excuse Me While I Disappear - Stories

…resumed playing their video games. Alicia and Kathleen Marie continued to read. Dorelia raised the volume of her laughter. Anselm and Oskar were lost in thought again. Maya sang in whispers to Angelica. Leon licked his lips and smiled weakly. Eduardo put his pan pipe to his lips, then paused as he caught sight of Maya’s lips forming a scream he couldn’t hear.

Dios mio!

What’s going on?

I don’t know.

Angelica!

Call 911!

I can’t get service!

Pull the emergency brake!

But we’re not moving!

Why is that woman screaming?

Why is that woman laughing?

Call the driver. Use the intercom. Tell him—

What?

Unum

It was sick, like it was all a setup. I thought it was one of those candid-camera things to see how stupid we were. There was the Cuban girl screaming that she lost her baby. But she didn’t lose her baby. A baby can’t just go and get lost when you’re all stuck on a subway car underneath the East River. It was probably just curled up at the bottom of the sack. And the whole time, there’s that fat lady laughing out loud. Come on, man, think about it. It didn’t happen because it couldn’t happen. I knew it all along. That’s why I didn’t do nothing. Then I’m the one gets booked. What does that say about our goddamn e pluribus u —

Ziva Interrupts.

It says everybody is used to easy answers speedily delivered. And so I will not linger on the details of my background, I will move on past my aborted education at the University of London to my unhappy year as a secretary for a predatory chartered accountant who routinely patted my backside to reassure himself that it was still there, through the deaths of my parents and a series of jobs that never worked out but kept me too busy to think about marriage, to New York, 1979, where my older sister was living with her three daughters, after having recently divorced her American husband. The said husband turned out to be living a secret life under a different name, with a second wife and two children, but that’s another matter, irrelevant to the subject at hand. I need only say that with the husband gone, I helped my sister raise her girls. Shortly after my sister died in 1985, my savings ran out, so I went out looking for a job and found one as a nanny for a family on Central Park West.

I moved to my current apartment in Forest Hills, the years passed, the children in my charge grew up, I found another family to work for on East Sixty-Seventh Street, I grew old, I spent my hard-earned money on Walter’s car service, sparing myself from the long climb down to the subway and back up again, but because Walter was stuck in traffic for two hours and ended up turning around and heading back to Queens, I had to take the subway home from work on that fateful day.

The Day the E Train Stalled and a Baby Disappeared into Thin Air

Just like that.

The poor mother.

And to think of that obese woman laughing the whole while.

And the preacher holding on to the pole, looking utterly baffled.

And Kathleen Marie panicking, convinced that there was a terrorist among the group, while her daughter gave up trying not to stare and stared at Maya, who was still screaming, and at Dorelia beside her, who was still laughing.

While Audrey and Alicia and Anselm scrambled to help.

And Oskar watched sleepily, as if from a great distance.

And Jack remained in his corner seat, avoiding any involvement because he already knew that whatever happened, he’d be blamed.

The Investigation

It would have been hard not to perceive that the sling pouch was empty. But in the aftermath, only Sally would confirm Maya’s claim that the baby was truly gone, and no one believed her. Audrey and Alicia would be persuaded by Anselm, who attributed the mother’s confusion to the train’s temporary power outage. Oskar would say he’d been dozing and wasn’t sure what happened. Kathleen Marie would accuse Jack of causing a distraction in order to prepare for the attack he was plotting. Jack would plead innocence. Dorelia would be identified as a schizophrenic who had stopped taking medication she couldn’t afford. The investigating agents gave up on Eduardo the pan-pipe player, who was deaf and couldn’t sign in English. As for Ziva—none of the other passengers would confirm that Ziva had been present.

I Was There .

And though my calls to the police go unanswered, I will not be silent. It should be worth something that I remember the faces of all participants and am able to identify the impostors who have multiplied exponentially, as interest in the story has spread. Judging from the number of people who swear that they saw it, you’d think there must have been a crowd of thousands stuffed into that subway car. In fact, there were only eleven passengers. Plus yours truly—the unremarkable Ziva—makes twelve altogether. Oh, and the baby. I will tell you what happened to that baby, but first—

The Child Herself

Why, she wasn’t even a year old. Of course she couldn’t describe what happened to her in that gap between the moment after the sling pouch Maya was carrying suddenly went slack, like a deflated balloon, and when it filled again, an interval lasting hardly more than a minute, two minutes at the most, though it was long enough for several passengers to spring from the benches in panic, bellowing, bumping into each other, some diving for the subway intercom, others falling to their knees and searching under the benches, behind shopping bags and briefcases, all of them temporarily convinced that the baby had indeed gone missing. Especially after the purple Binky the baby had been sucking was found on the bench between Dorelia and Maya.

Some had suspicions they wouldn’t admit to later: that Leon had grabbed the baby when the lights went dark and thrown it out the window, or Jack had stolen the baby and stuffed it in his backpack, or Dorelia had eaten it.

And then Angelica came back. Sally was the one who noticed first, just as the train started moving forward again with a jerk, throwing the passengers off balance, so that they stumbled into each other before reaching for the poles and overhead handles.

Why, there she is. She must have been there all along! Wriggling in the pouch, bending her neck back to gaze serenely at the faces of startled strangers. There she is, indeed. Angelica, you naughty girl, where were you hiding?

From Dorelia’s Perspective

She had never, ever seen anything funnier!

By the Time…

…Angelica was five, she’d heard her mother tell the story more times than she could count, so many times that she wasn’t sure if she actually remembered the incident, or if she’d made up the faint memory in an effort to complement the few verifiable facts. Did she imagine falling through a darkness so absolute that she wasn’t sure if she was plunging down into a bottomless hole or shooting up through the universe? Was it her own hysteria she felt at the loss that even her baby brain could perceive, or the hysteria her mother described in her retelling? Had she really tumbled head over heels from the visible world into another dimension?

She remembers, or remembers imagining, that as she fell she heard the sound of laughter in the distance. Later she would compare it to the piping of birds across the park. What a sweet sound. She was desperate to hear it more clearly. She wanted to be moving toward the laughter, not away from it, so she began to resist what seemed inevitable. She clawed against the emptiness, dragging her baby nails against the sides of the abyss in an effort to stop her plunge. And to her amazement, she managed to slow the speed of her fall until she felt as if she were merely sinking, as if into saltwater. She gave a fierce kick and was suspended, then cupped the emptiness in her hands and pulled herself up toward the surface of her life, swimming back to where the laughter was coming from, back to her nest in the denim sling pouch strung across her mother’s chest.