Evan Hunter - The Moment She Was Gone

My mother called the police after the third visit, but they were a Mickey Mouse department and they didn’t take fingerprints or anything, and besides it never happened again, so that was the end of that. My mother never surrendered her belief that my father had been breaking into the house out of Irish spite. Aaron and I figured a squirrel or a raccoon had been breaking the glass on the kitchen door, trying to get at the food in the pantry. Only Annie knew it wasn’t any squirrel or raccoon breaking that glass.

She told me years later that she used to sneak out of the house in her nightgown, and run down the hill through the trees, past Daddy’s studio to where the property joined the main road. There she would lie on her belly in the dark, watching automobiles speed by in the dead of night. Sometimes, when she got back to the house, she found the kitchen door locked behind her. She would break the glass panel just above the lock, and then reach in to open the door. Once she cut her hand. When she mentioned all this, I asked her why she would do such a thing. Leave the house in the middle of the night to go watch cars speeding by on the road below. She told me she thought Daddy might be coming back. She told me she was waiting for Daddy.

Now I wonder if my father was the start of it all.

Her neurosis, or whatever it is.

Whatever has caused her to run away again in the middle of the night.

In the summer of 1982, my mother took Annie and me to Europe. We visited Denmark and Sweden and Norway, the Scandinavian Tour, except that we never got to Finland because my mother said it was too close to Russia and this was still during the Cold War, and she was afraid there’d be a pogrom or something. It was in Stockholm, at our hotel, that my sister fell in love with an eighteen-year-old waiter named Sven. She was fifteen at the time. Our birthdays are in September, and this was in August.

“Oh, he’s so beautiful, ” she used to tell me, which I guess he was, with my sister’s blond hair and green eyes, almost a third twin except that he was much taller than I, and spoke English with a marked accent. We were moving on to Norway the following week. My sister stared at Sven goggle-eyed and open-mouthed while he brought us double desserts. My mother thought it was cute, Annie being so smitten and all. I thought it was dangerous. I knew what eighteen-year-old boys wanted from beautiful young girls. Especially eighteen-year-old Swedish boys. When he asked her to go for a walk one night, my mother said Sure, why not, what’s the harm?

I followed them at a discreet distance. Well, not too discreet. I didn’t want to lose them. T didn’t want him working his Swedish charms on my unsuspecting little sister, my kid sister. I am five minutes older than she is. I chipped my collar bone coming out of my mother’s womb, preparing the way for both of us. They had to put me in an incubator. When the doctor came in to report this to my mother, he said, “One of your twins, the boy, is a little rocky, so we put him in an incubator.” A little rocky! His exact words. My mother almost expired on the spot. He was trying to tell her I’d experienced some discomfort breaking my collar bone. Anyway, he walked her by the lake, young Sven did. My fifteen-year-old sister. He kissed her by the lake. I wanted to strangle him. I kept watching. One false move...

But no, that was it.

That solitary kiss by the lake, under a full moon. And then he walked her back to the hotel, and... well, wait a minute... he kissed her once again. I watched her go up the steps into the hotel. I watched him looking after her as she disappeared. Then he put his hands in his pockets and walked away.

She sent him postcards every day.

It was as if my mother and I were no longer with her. All through Norway, she talked of him day and night. We’d be having lunch or dinner, she’d be scribbling postcards to him, sometimes three or four postcards a day. It was infuriating. And humiliating. We were invisible. His birthday was at the end of August, she wanted to send him a gift. We went shopping all one day, looking for an appropriate shirt for him. She made me try on six or seven shirts she liked, to see how they looked. I told her Sven was bigger than I was. She said, “That’s okay, I just want to get an idea.” Six or seven shirts. Maybe eight. She finally picked a lime-green, short-sleeved shirt she said would go well with his blond hair and green eyes. My mother thought all of this was cute, even though she was the one who paid for the shirt. In retrospect, this is not strange. She’s been paying for my sister’s voyage through life ever since.

We got back home at the beginning of September. There was no communication from Sven, not a letter, not a postcard, nothing. No acknowledgment that he had received any of her ten thousand postcards, no thank you for the lime-green birthday shirt, nothing. Our own birthday was on the eighteenth. My mother planned to throw a sweet-sixteen party for us. Annie and I insisted that we supply the music.

Our group was called The Boppers, which was a play on the expression “teeny-boppers” and a reference as well to the time-honored series of books about The Bobbsey Twins, not to mention a sidelong wink at “bop,” which was very far from the kind of music we were playing at the time. This was 1982, remember. The Beatles had broken up long ago. In fact, John Lennon had been killed almost two years ago. Paul McCartney had recorded a song called “Ebony and Ivory” with Stevie Wonder, and it was now the number-four song on the charts. The Boppers imitated it to perfection. We also played “Eye of the Tiger,” the Survivor hit, and “Don’t You Want Me” from the Human League, and we did a fair rendition of the Steve Miller Band’s “Abracadabra,” too. Not to mention all the Golden Oldies from when you and I were young, Gertie. Altogether, we weren’t a bad band.

I played bass guitar, and my sister played the tambourines and sang. She had a strong, clear voice, not unlike Janis Joplin’s, or so everyone, including me, told her. We used to rehearse in a church hall six blocks from the apartment we were still living in with my mother; Aaron was already off at college. We kept all our equipment at the church... well, not my guitar. But everything else. Tuners and amplifiers and speakers, and microphones, all the stuff every garage band in the nation, or perhaps the world, had to buy if they ever hoped to achieve instant stardom. My mother had paid for the equipment, of course. It had cost something like six thousand dollars.

Two days before our birthday, after we’d been rehearsing for close to ten days, my sister hocked all the equipment, bought herself a ticket to Stockholm, and ran off to meet her beloved Sven. Of course, we didn’t know where she’d gone at first. We just knew she was gone. Aaron was the one who suggested that she’d gone in search of her “inamorato,” the exact word he used. This was confirmed at the beginning of October, when we received a postcard from an island called Visby. It read, “Can’t find Sven, moving on, love to you all. Annie.” Not even a happy birthday to me.

Not even that.

In retrospect, though, her search through the Scandinavian countries, and later London and Paris, was the shortest of all her excursions. She was still a minor at the time, and after my mother contacted the State Department, they were able to track her comings and goings through various ports of entry and finally located her in a seedy hotel on the Left Bank.

When my mother got her on the phone, she told her that unless she was on the next plane to New York, she would have the French police arrest her, a threat Annie apparently believed because, lo and behold, she showed up at the apartment two days later, looking none the worse for wear, and telling us smugly that there were far better-looking men than Sven Lindqvist in this wide world of ours. We thought she was cured of her adolescent crush as well as her recent wanderlust.