Evan Hunter - The Moment She Was Gone

You heard me correctly.

Embryos.

Plural.

Two of them.

Augusta had been bearing twins.

I have never forgiven Aaron for that.

I felt he and his wife had flushed my own heritage down the drain.

Annie believes she is an adept who has been initiated into a form of Tantric yoga.

Her tongue is pierced. She wears a little silver circlet in it, which she says she purchased at a bazaar in Katmandu. She wears another silver circlet through her left nostril (Hong Kong) and yet another through the brow over her right eye (Sri Lanka). Kissing Annie hello is like kissing a jewelry tray. She also has a tattoo on her right buttock, a swastika above the words Ek Xib Chac in red, below which are the words Chac Xib Chac in black, which she says translates as “The red and the black,” though she did not mention in which language, probably Sanskrit. She says she acquired the tattoo in Berlin before the wall came down, and before she headed for more exotic places. She proudly explained to a dining room full of dinner guests on one of her frequent stays in my mother’s apartment that the swastika was an ancient and treasured symbol in her religion, and might have exhibited her tattoo if my mother hadn’t called everyone to coffee and dessert in the living room just then.

Annie tells me she once ate sweet potatoes and later shat in the woods with native tribesmen in Papua New Guinea. She tells me she was mauled by a tiger in a remote section of India, the name of which I can’t even pronounce, but which falls ever so trippingly off my sister’s tongue.

I no longer know if any of these things are real or merely figments of Annie’s fertile imagination.

Ever since what happened in Sicily a month and a half ago, I simply do not know.

Whenever Annie runs away, I blame my mother.

I blame her because she keeps giving Annie money even though she’s been advised time and again that she is just pissing the money down the toilet. My sister-in-law Augusta doesn’t like my mother to give Annie money, either, but that’s because she’s fearful her two daughters won’t inherit as much when Grandma dies. In that respect, Annie and she are soulmates. My sister often talks about friends of hers who have inherited huge sums of money, or luxurious houses, or acres and acres of undeveloped land in Florida. She seems to think my mother is enormously wealthy. I don’t know what gives her this idea; there is no empirical evidence to support such a notion of wealth. My mother’s apartment on West End looks like the shabby abode of a European lady who has seen better times. The furniture is shoddy, the drapes need cleaning. There is the faint odor of mustiness and age clinging to everything. And vet, she keeps sending money to Annie.

I think she’s afraid my sister will become a prostitute or a homeless person. I think she’s afraid she will be blamed for my sister’s destitute state, if it ever comes to that. Even before Sicily we were all a little afraid of that. Afraid we’d be held responsible somehow if anything happened to her. Jewish guilt. My brother may be right. We may all of us be Jews, after all. Except my sister-in-law and her two bastard children.

So here we are on a hot muggy night in August, commiserating and plotting because Annie has fled once again, and we’re all afraid that before morning Sicily will happen all over again.

Then again, Annie has always run away, with or without seeming provocation. In fact, she has been traveling all over the world without incident ever since—

Well, that isn’t quite true.

On the other hand, it’s almost true.

Except for that one crazy week in Italy a month and a half ago, Annie has managed to keep out of serious trouble for most of her life. Sicily was the only episode... well, incident... well, episode... I promise you, the only one.

The family has heard various versions of what happened, most of them from Annie herself, one of them from yours truly who went to Italy to “rescue” her, as Annie puts it. After everything Bertuzzi told me, I don’t know which parts of her story are true. It’s a known fact, of course, that there are banditos on the road in various isolated parts of Italy, and especially in Sicily where my sister had gone to seek out the wisdom of a guru whose name I still can’t pronounce and whose presence in Italy, of all places, I still sincerely doubt. But possibly the bandito part of her story is true, no matter what Bertuzzi says.

Before the incident — well, episode — Annie told us she was living in a room she rented from the village butcher. This was undoubtedly true. She told us she had met a German girl from Frankfurt, possibly also true, who like herself was an initiate, and who — again like herself — was in Sicily to seek further enlightenment and inspiration from Abu Ben Pipik or whatever his name was.

According to Annie, she and Lise were enjoying a bottle of cheap Sicilian red at a quiet outdoor table under a grape arbor when two Italian “roughs,” as Annie later called them, approached the table and began making fun of her rings, the one in her nose, yes, and the one over her eye, but especially the one in her tongue.

I have to tell you that my sister generally takes exceptionally good care of herself. She is three inches shorter than I am, which makes her five-nine, and she weighs a hundred and thirty pounds, which makes her slender — well, before she went to Italy, she’d let herself go a bit, but I would guess by the time of the trouble there, she was back in good shape again. When Annie isn’t sitting silent and motionless in the lotus position, practicing yoga, she is doing sit-ups or pushups or jogging in place. She is extremely fit. We both have green eyes — Aaron’s are blue, but thank you, anyway, Mom. We both have blond hair — so does Aaron, thank you unconditionally, Terrence Gulliver, wherever you may be. Annie’s hair is blonder than mine, almost flaxen, in fact, but that’s because on her travels (“Gulliver’s Travels,” we sometimes call-them) she spends a great deal of time in the sun. Altogether, my sister looks like what the guys on the singles scene in New York might call a babe. So it is understandable that a pair of Sicilian youths on the prowl might have approached the table where she and Lise were in deep conversation. That part of the story is possibly true, though Bertuzzi thinks it’s all imagined.

Annie isn’t fluent in any language except English, but she does have a smattering of French and Italian, so maybe her recounting of the dialogue at the table is accurate. In any case, in yet another retelling of the story, Lise was fluent in Italian, including the Neapolitan and Sicilian dialects, and it was she who was doing the translating. Here, then, is how the conversation at the table went, as translated by a German girl from Frankfurt, repeated later by Annie, and sincerely doubted by Bertuzzi.

“Hey, girls, you want some company?”

“No, thank you, we’re having a little private talk here.”

This from my sister.

“But thank you for asking.”

This from Lise: my sister insists it encouraged a further dialogue.

“Why are you wearing a ring over your eye?”

“None of your business.”

“How about the one in your nose?”

“Ditto.”

“Doesn’t it get in the way when you kiss?”

“Boys, we’re not interested, okay?”

“Are you lesbians?”

This may seem like far too sophisticated a comment from an ignorant Sicilian farmer, but remember that if a woman isn’t interested in an Italian man’s obvious charms, she must be queer. On the other hand, I myself have often wondered about Annie’s sexual orientation, so it’s entirely possible that she and Lise were enjoying more than just a private conversation at their hidden table. In one of Annie’s tellings, they were meditating. In another, they were holding hands. In a third version, they were holding hands and meditating. Given the question about the nose ring getting in the way of kissing, might they not have been kissing as well? Who knows? I sometimes think my sister wrote the screenplay for Rashomon.