Idra Novey - Ways to Disappear

Disgusted, he got up and shuffled into the kitchen. It was almost dawn. Agitated, he flipped again through the unopened mail from the day before and stopped at a slender blue envelope that he hadn’t noted earlier among the bills. The post office stamp said Boipeba, the smallest of the Tinharé islands off the coast of Salvador. It was the slip of island where After the Alley ended — or rather where the novel ended in his version of it. The scene he’d chosen for the final page hadn’t been the last one in the document, but he’d felt confident that it was the correct place to close the story, and that Beatriz would agree. He’d left the woman standing at the edge of the ocean with her child while the man who is not the child’s father lies asleep, oblivious, in the hotel, the sun reflecting so harshly off the sand that the woman tells the little girl to close her eyes.

He’d been uncertain about eliminating the pages after that without Beatriz’s permission. At the thought of it now, he nervously jerked back his thumb and sliced it along the edge of the envelope. That damned woman. Whatever she wanted from him now, he would ignore it.

Unfolding the letter inside, he skipped to the end of the message, to the name Yolanda. They had disagreed about that early story as well. He had thought Beatriz could get away with only so many tales of self-sabotage in one book, and Yolanda was an adolescent character. He found teenagers even more irritating in fiction than they tended to be in reality. Yolanda in her foolish adolescent pursuit of gloom pretended to be deaf. She gave herself over to this false malady so completely that she didn’t hear, or refused to hear, the soldiers approaching her family’s house, or her father calling for her to run and hide in the silo. She just kept cutting things out of her mother’s magazines, the word “shine” and then a sliver of a windowpane, her hand guiding the scissor blades as delicately as if she were cutting a bandage off a wound.

Querido Roberto,

The quiet here is complete.

You were right, this was the place to let things end.

Please tell Raquel I’ll wait for her.

I’m at the hotel with the yellow umbrellas.

Yolanda

At 4 a.m., Emma entered her room to find Miles snoring in her bed and Marcus’s boxers in the trash can. The location of the boxers was easy enough to alter. She just quietly extracted them from the garbage and zipped them into the inner pocket of her luggage.

Miles’s current location, however, was harder to resolve, and she was exhausted. So many hours of keeping vigil outside the trauma ward, waiting for news about Marcus, had worn her down. Every time a new nurse appeared, she’d asked for an update and for the woman to let Raquel know she was still there. The nurses had all nodded politely. One had finally given in and told her that Marcus was no longer in danger of dying. Finally, at close to dawn, Raquel had emerged. There’d been two surgeries and a blood transfusion, but he was alive and being pumped with antibiotics through an IV. Most likely, he would be asleep until noon. Raquel insisted that there was no reason for Emma to stay, and so Emma had returned, exhausted, to her hotel though everything in her body told her it was not where she was supposed to be.

For so long, she’d willfully sought the in-between. She’d thought of herself as fated to live suspended, floating between two countries, in the vapor between languages. But too much vaporous freedom brought its own constraints. She now felt as confined by her floating state as other, more wholesome people were to the towns where they were born.

She stared at the man snoring in her bed. She’d gotten under the covers next to him so many times, but her legs would not allow it now. They were already backing up to the door. In the hall, just outside the room, she sank to the floor. The carpet beneath her had the stiff, prickly feel of Astroturf. But what alternative did she have? She couldn’t pay for a second room. Her checking account was down to the triple digits, and really, all she needed was to be horizontal for a moment, to lie in this hallway and close her eyes for just a second and continue the scene she hadn’t finished in her notebook. In the evening light, the translator’s hazy specter on the stand had taken on slightly more definition, if only from the extra lights in the courtroom. All she needed to build her case now was for her author to arrive and testify on her behalf, to tell the court…

Senhora, você precisa de um médico? Você caiu?

Emma woke up to somebody’s high-heeled sandals in front of her face. Stiff bristles of grass had imprinted themselves on her cheek and legs. Or no, it wasn’t grass. It was carpet. She was still in the hallway. Looking up, she saw that the sandals belonged to a kind-faced older woman with a São Paulo accent. The woman inquired about the cut above her eye and asked if she should call a doctor.

Thank you, but I’m fine, really. Emma tried to get up to demonstrate that she was neither ill nor insane, but one of her feet had turned into a sandbag.

I’m so sorry, she said as the woman helped her to her feet. This is my room, right here. Emma gave a brisk, confident knock to prove it.

Miles swung open the door immediately, already dressed and shaved and freshly furious. You look awful, he said. Where have you been?

I’ve been nowhere, she replied. Absolutely nowhere.

Then it was noon. The brightest, sight-obliterating Brazilian kind of noon. Emma’s eyes were still adjusting as she entered the trauma ward and finally approached Marcus’s bed. It took her a minute to comprehend the ruin of swollen skin and stitches that had replaced his face. The misshapen right side of his jaw was now a wedge of raw meat.

Close the door, Raquel ordered from the chair.

Emma obeyed, relieved to have a reason to look away from Marcus and busy herself with the things she’d brought for him. Should I put your clothes here, on the table? I also brought your chocolate and some mango for—

He’s in pain, Raquel said. Can you just sit down?

Of course. I’m sorry. Emma clutched her tote bag to her chest, but once again there was no obvious spot for her to put herself. There was only one chair and Raquel was in it. Maybe I should come back later, she offered.

No, now’s fine. I really need to eat. Raquel stood up and the two women silently changed places, Emma taking up the lone chair on the far side of the bed, away from the IV stand. Once Raquel had gone, she pressed her lips to Marcus’s fingers. His arm looked paler to her now, the veins more visible at the surface.

Minha tradutora, he murmured, and she told him how long she’d sat out in the waiting room, how much she’d wanted to go in the ambulance, but his sister…

I know. He closed his eyes. She was now close enough to see the scabs at the corners of his lips, the long row of stitches along the swollen flap that was the remaining gesture of his ear. She felt sick at the savagery of it and at the thought of her author knowing this had happened to her son. Or not knowing.

I’m going to find her for you, she said.

Please don’t, and Raquel shouldn’t either. We were naive, Marcus said with a tone that was the closest to bitter she’d ever heard from him. We should’ve gone into hiding like my mother did, or just left the country right away.