Evan Hunter - The Moment She Was Gone

It practically gallops.

The audience fell down laughing.

It practically gallops.

My brother Aaron doesn’t like to think insanity practically gallops in our family. His two adopted daughters are immune, of course, but suppose he himself should one day begin brushing imaginary cockroaches off the coverlet, an unlikelihood at his age, but, listen, who can tell?

I put the phone receiver back on its cradle.

“She’s not at Bellevue,” I say.

“I think we should call the police,” Augusta suggests.

“No police,” my mother says flatly. “I don’t want Annie ending up in another lunatic asylum. She isn’t psychotic.”

“The doctor in Sicily told Andy...”

“Some doctor.”

“If a goddamn psychiatrist flatly states...”

“I’m not interested in what he stated. And watch your language, Miss.”

“In fact, we should have called the police years ago.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Calm down, you two, okay?” Aaron says.

“When you live with a person closely,” my mother says, quite evenly, “you get to know that person pretty well, even if she is your own daughter. Annie functions fine on her own...”

“Still,” Augusta says, “we can’t dismiss the fact...”

“Normally,” my mother says, raising her voice, “she functions well on her own. She is capable of making and executing plans...”

“Which sometimes get her in trouble,” Aaron says.

“Not very often,” my mother says.

“Often enough,” Augusta says. “She just landed herself in a Sicilian hospital...”

“That is a rare instance.”

“... where she was diagnosed as schizophrenic.”

“Nonsense,” my mother says. “If I had to characterize her, I’d say she’s an artistically obsessed religious zealot.”

“Then maybe she’s hiding out in St. Patrick’s Cathedral,” Augusta says. “Or the Museum of Modern Art.”

I hate it when my sister-in-law tries to be funny about Annie. I think she does this only to gain further favor with Aaron, who by the way has never thought any of our sister’s little escapades were in the slightest bit comical, even when they really were. As for example, the time she peed on a cop’s shoes in Georgia.

“Or maybe we ought to go look for her guru,” Augusta adds, compounding the felony.

“Augusta, you’re not being funny,” I say.

“Tell her,” my mother says.

“We’re trying to figure out what to do here, and you...”

“All right, all right,” Augusta says, and waves her hands on the air.

“If Annie really tries to hurt someone...”

“She won’t hurt anyone,” my mother says.

“You don’t know that, Mom.”

“I know she hasn’t hurt anyone so far.”

I give my mother a look, but say nothing.

We spend the next hour or so calling every hospital in New York City. My mother has only one line going into her apartment, so we take turns on the phone. There are thirty or so general hospitals in Manhattan, and another fifty or more in the other four boroughs. We call the ones in Manhattan first, because we figure if Annie’s going to get in trouble it’ll be right here in the city and not anywhere else.

Augusta, by the way, still doesn’t know that to anyone born and bred in New York, Manhattan is “the city.” If somebody living in the Bronx is going downtown to see a Broadway show, he says he’s going “into the city,” even though technically, the Bronx is part of the city as well. Augusta was born in Ridley Hills, New Jersey, where she was the belle of the ball and the delight of the Ridley Royals. She doesn’t know from city streets. I know she hates my sister, and won’t allow her to set foot in her house. Maybe that’s why I dislike her so intensely.

She now keeps insisting that we call the police. Mama will hear of no such thing. After what happened in Sicily, she is afraid Annie will end up in some mental institution again, in a strait jacket, banging her head against the wall and sitting in her own shit. They will perform electro-convulsive therapy on her, and immerse her in hot or cold baths, and eventually they will do a prefrontal lobotomy and turn her into a fucking vegetable..

Sometimes, I, too, believe this will happen to my poor dear sister.

And it frightens me.

It is Augusta’s turn on the phone now. When she has called ten hospitals in Manhattan, one of us will relieve her, and begin calling the next ten. Meanwhile, we are trying to dope out where Annie might have gone.

“I just hope she isn’t already on a plane to Timbuktu,” my mother says.

“Did you give her money again?” I ask.

“No. But there’s nothing wrong with giving her money.”

“After Sicily, I would have hoped...”

“Forget Sicily. You’re obsessed with Sicily. What happened there is not representative.”

“Maybe we should call the airports, anyway,” Aaron suggests. “In case she got hold of some money somehow.”

“Oh, she knows how to get hold of money, all right,” Augusta says, and rolls her eyes.

“Well, let’s finish with the hospitals first,” I say.

“You really should put in a second line,” Aaron tells my mother.

“Sure, and who’ll pay for it?”

“It would come in handy in emergencies like this.”

“This isn’t an emergency,” my mother says. “Annie’s gone away before. She’s always managed to take care of herself and come back safely.”

“This is a waste of time,” Augusta says, and puts the phone back on its cradle. “It’s four in the morning, all I’m getting are nurses’ aides with Spanish accents.”

“Nobody speaks English in this city anymore,” my mother says.

“Must be a conspiracy, Mom.”

“Tell me about it, Andrew.”

“Augusta’s right,” Aaron says, ever to the rescue. “Annie isn’t in any hospital, she’s just hiding. As usual.”

“You know that for a fact, huh, Aaron?” I say.

“I’m basing it on empirical knowledge. She has never tried to hurt herself, so why are we calling every damn hospital in the city? We called Bellevue, that should be enough.”

“By the time we call all these hospitals,” Augusta says, “she could be on her way to God knows where.”

I’m beginning to think they’re right. If Annie, God forbid, got hit by a bus, and they took her to the nearest hospital, they’d immediately discover she was nuts — if, in fact, she is — and transfer her to Bellevue, wouldn’t they? But we ourselves have been living with her strange behavior ever since she was sixteen, and none of us ever thought she was truly sick until Bertuzzi in Sicily laid all the cards on the table, and called a spade a spade. It’s possible, then, that she’s already in some hospital out there, suffering from a broken leg or a nose bleed, and no one has yet recognized that she may need... well... psychiatric help.

“Maybe we ought to call Dr. Lang,” I suggest.

“A lot of good she did,” my mother says. “Annie’s run off again, hasn’t she? Don’t you have a cell phone, Aaron? President of a big corporation? Your brother, I can understand...”

Meaning I am but a mere teacher of English in the New York City school system.

“But you? Even Annie has a cell phone. You really should get a cell phone.”

“Maybe we should call that shrink,” Augusta says.

“Why?” my mother asks.

“Well, first of all,” I say, “I’d like to hear her evaluation of...”

“I wouldn’t.”

“She may have some insights into...”

“You shouldn’t have gone to her in the first place.”

“It was Annie’s suggestion, Mom.”

“You chose the doctor.”