Evan Hunter - The Moment She Was Gone

“And Lyow the singer?”

“Such funny names.”

“So long ago,” I said.

“Flying across the North Sea, do you remember that?”

“ ‘Bump — they were on the ground,’ ” I quoted.

My sister picked up on it at once, finishing the passage for me. “ ‘They held their wings above their heads for a moment,’ ” she said, “ ‘then folded them with a quick and pretty neatness.’ ”

And together we shouted, “ ‘They had crossed the North Sea!’ ” and burst out laughing.

“Oh such fun!” Annie said.

“Oh such language!” I said.

But now there are no pigeons in Tiananmen Square.

The last time I saw Annie before her trip to Italy was in February of this year. I went up to Maine for the weekend of the twenty-second. On the car radio, they were talking about the Olympics in Salt Lake City. The Russians were now demanding a duplicate gold medal for their skater, Irina Slutskaya, who they said had beaten sixteen-year-old Sarah Hughes...

“Why not give everyone a gold medal?” I asked the radio.

At the Hague, Slobodan Milosevic had projected for the Tribunal judges a documentary movie made by an American film maker, attempting to prove that all his crimes should be blamed on anyone but himself.

“Fat Chance Department,” I said, and began stabbing at buttons on the dash, trying to find a station playing classical music, a near impossibility on the road. By chance, I stumbled upon public radio, but it came in riddled with static. I finally settled for a station playing pop and advertising merchants in Portland.

In this, the dead of our American winter, I drove up Maine’s craggy shoreline to visit my sister for the last time before she left for Europe and who knew where else? The landscape was desolate. What during the summer must have been festive seaside resorts were now shuttered and windblown hot dog stands, large brooding hotels, and Ferris wheels with their empty gaily painted seats rocking in the wind. I drove the rented car with the heater up full, and even then I was shivering.

My mother had told me that Annie was living in “a charming seaside cottage.”

I drove up a gravel driveway lined with scraggly bushes and withered stalks of weeds. A wooden shack with gray smoke billowing from its brick chimney sat on the edge of a cliff, the sky beyond it menacing and forlorn. Below, huge waves crashed against a narrow beach strewn with shiny black rocks. Salt spray burst on the brittle air.

I parked the car as close to the house as I could. Struggling against the wind, I took my small suitcase from the trunk, carried it to the front door, and knocked.

I had not seen my sister for several months now.

I had only my mother’s reports to go on.

I think I mentioned that Annie usually takes very good care of herself. She is a tall woman with a stately carriage and blond hair she normally wears falling loose and sleek to her shoulders. She rarely wears makeup... well, she doesn’t need any, really. Her green eyes are somewhat almond shaped, and she has thick lashes, and high cheekbones, and a good nose, and a full mouth that makes its statement without benefit of lipstick, truly. She has always been a quite beautiful girl.

I did not recognize the woman who opened the door for me.

“Andy?” she said. “Hey, bro!”

And took me in her arms, and hugged me.

She was wearing what my mother used to call “a candy-store owner” sweater, a shapeless gray cardigan missing several buttons down its front, hanging open over the sort of housedress my grandmother Rozalia used to wear when she was cleaning the house in New Rochelle, a loose-fitting cotton garment printed with a vague flower design on a faded green field. Her hair was clipped short. It framed her face haphazardly and appeared grimy and limp, as if she hadn’t washed it in days or even weeks. She was wearing combat boots with leather laces, and cotton stockings of a sort of buff color, wrinkled and hanging limp on her legs, distorting the shape of them and adding to the impression of... well... a shopping bag lady who’d just come back from searching through garbage cans on a city street. She had gained weight, but she did not appear plump, she merely looked... unhealthy. Unkempt and unhealthy.

“How are you, Sis?” I asked.

“Oh, fine, Andy, just fine,” she said. “Let me look at you.” Holding my hands, she held me at arms’ length and studied me approvingly, nodding, smiling. “Your hands are freezing, ” she said, “come sit by the fire, come. Would you like some tea? I just made some wonderful herbal tea, a friend of mine sells organic food in a little shop she owns, you’ll meet her tonight, would you like some?”

“Yes, I’d love some.”

She had replaced the ring in her left nostril with one of her own design. It strongly resembled a miniature silver penis, its eye decorated with a tiny red ruby, as if its bulbous head were bleeding. The circlet over her right eye was similarly fashioned of silver. It was etched with miniature markings of what I supposed was Sanskrit.

I sat by the fire in a chair upholstered in cracked and peeling brown leather. It looked like something a lawyer might have thrown out when he was redecorating his office, something Annie might have found in some back alley someplace.

“How was the drive up?” she asked.

“Fine. Cold. Barren. But fine.”

“Oooo, yes, it’s cold up here. I can’t wait to get out.”

She was at the stove now, in the small kitchen that formed part of this... well... this dump she was living in. Mama’s “charming seaside cottage” was in fact a single large room with four double-hung windows and walls papered with peeling wallpaper in a repeating pink hibiscus pattern that seemed more suited to Florida than to Maine. One corner of the room had been set aside as a work space, with a high stool and a table upon which Annie had spread her tools and her works in progress. In the kitchen, there was a chipped white enamel-topped table, with two wooden chairs painted green around it, There was a single bed on one wall of the room, and a cot on the other, both of them covered with fringed throws that looked Indian, and an unpainted dresser with an incense burner and a cluster of candles of various sizes on its top, and there was a clothes line hanging near the fireplace, festooned now with woolen — well, bloomers, I have to call them, because they were too shapeless to be called panties — of the same buff color as Annie’s stockings. All at once, I got the feeling that my sister was living at the poverty level. All at once, I wondered exactly how much money my mother was sending her each month.

“Did you want lemon or milk in this?” she asked.

“Lemon, please,” I said.

“Good, because I ran out of milk this morning.”

She brought me the tea in a mug. “Here,” she said, “drink this while it’s hot,” and handed me the mug and a paper napkin. I opened the napkin and spread it on my lap. I warmed my hands on the steaming mug.

“Taste it,” she said.

I sipped at the tea.

“Nice, huh?” she said.

“Mm, delicious.”

“I told you,” she said, smiling.

She sat opposite me on a low stool, tucking the faded housedress between her legs. The fire crackled and spit.

“When are you leaving?” I asked.

“The sooner the better,” she said.

“Yes, but when?”

“I thought the middle of March. Italy’s no great shakes in February, you know. I thought I’d get there just as spring arrives.”

“Good timing,” I said.

“Oh sure.”

“Where will you be going first?” I asked.

“Sicily, I think. It’s all the way to the south. It should be nice and warm there in March.”