It took me a few years to understand that the spell was one of Yeats’s and that my uncle had built the box with his own hands to a purpose. I discovered I could curl up and hide out when my father was hunting me. He would open the door in the midst of bellowing and tearing things up around my room, but that was about it. He probably thought a disappearing box was too easy and simple-minded a place to hide. After all, he was used to working with professional criminals. I only wish that I had had a disappearing box for my mother.
The summer I joined my uncle on the carnival circuit, my father took an ax to that thing and started a bonfire with it. I imagine he had found out about the hiding place.
It’s always been my Uncle Sor I’ve wanted to emulate, never my father.
Before I close, your mother tells me you’ve decided to take a gap year. I hope you know I’ll be excited to hear your plans. You have a good head on your shoulders, Mona. It’s not a bad idea to build up some savings, but if you look at internships, we’ll have a room for you once we find the right place here. Public transportation is pretty good and we’ll make it work.
Love,
Dad
Sometimes I think my father’s drive to New Jersey, away from us—perhaps especially from me—began when I turned nine and started to assert my independence, speaking up in ways I hadn’t before. When we bought the house he worked longer hours and I had things to do with my friends on the weekends. I got used to Mom filling the spaces and became less interested in what he had to say. He became fragile if I was busy and didn’t have time to do something he hoped we might do—bowling, batting practice, miniature golf. As I pushed further into my own life, he appeared sullen or withdrawn. My mother understood life and art and what we’re here to do. He understood insurance.
I think he tried again to be this imaginary father when Lola was born. But once you carry a lack of confidence, it’s hard to hold a baby in your arms without thinking you’ll drop her.
After that we barely spoke at all.
Richard
I wrote something out to Liz at the kitchen table so she wouldn’t worry, and left half the money I’d gotten from the ATM. I slipped my car key off the ring. I knew Mona needed to sleep and Liz would insist she get up to say goodbye, and that would stir some new rancor I’d have to carry with me to Newark. Lola, who was the soundest sleeper, would be a sack of potatoes in Liz’s arms.
So I went back upstairs and instead of waking her I watched Liz in the circle of closet light. She was curled up with one hand tucked around her right breast, her hair spread along my pillow. This was the picture I would take with me, always wishing to crawl back into that one particular moment. I shut off the alarm.
Lola was in the little-girl bed I had assembled that week, out of her crib now in her own room. I stroked her hair and watched her breathe. I worried that she would grow too quickly while I was gone.
Downstairs again, I put my palm against Mona’s door and thought about turning the handle. Mona is a sleepwalker. She has a way of finding disturbances in nights the rest of us find calm. Maybe you could say that about the daytime too. With any luck she’d forgotten to set her alarm, consciously or unconsciously, the way she sometimes did, counting on Liz to wake her. I thought it best to let her be.
That morning became the coin toss. Daily I’ve wondered if waking my family up before taking off would have landed us differently.
With the suitcase in the car, I hoped to make it to New Jersey without spending a night in a motel. I had a blanket and pillow in the back if I needed to pull into a truck or rest stop. I let the handbrake out, and the car rolled down the drive.
I made good time all the way to Pennsylvania. The weather held, but the highway gradually filled with semis. I looked at pictures of donuts and office supplies and sweating Coke bottles on side panels for miles. It became harder to pass them, and then if I did, it was only to get wedged into another cluster of giant trucks. Reaching a rest stop, I grabbed a coffee and studied the Pennsylvania map, deciding on a rural route for the next leg.
I was fifteen minutes out on that two-lane highway when I saw a great plume of smoke—a cloud so long and thick it arced across the sky. Later I would try to tell Lola over the phone that it was like watching the tail of a giant cat. The smoke came from a tire graveyard set on fire, the rubber bedded down in gullies, pushed up ridges and thrown down over every slope. My windows were up, but the car filled with the stench.
A woman stood by her car on the shoulder making big, sweeping motions with her arms, appearing and disappearing in the smoke. I didn’t want to lose time, but I had stopped many times with Uncle Sor to help a stranger when we were on the road together. It’s what you do. Pulling ahead of her, I parked and got out and walked back to her car. She was midway between Mona’s age and Liz’s. She had a beautiful face torn up by acne and some kind of trouble. Her hair looked as if a fury had driven it straight into the air. There was a message on her T-shirt, but I didn’t want to stare at her chest. The backseat and the passenger side of her car were full. A small dog carrier sat on a pile of magazines in the front seat. I looked to see if there was a flat, but her tires were fine. “I have a few tools in my trunk,” I offered.
“The engine light wouldn’t go off, and I thought I had another can of oil. My sister lives a few towns over. Give me a lift?”
“Sure,” I said without asking which way over.
“I think someone can come back and tow it. Let me grab some stuff. I’m Linda, by the way.”
“Richard. You want to call them? I have a phone,” I said.
She fished hers out of her jeans and held it up, saying, “I think they do better with surprises. All I need is to get turned down because they have to think about it.” That’s when I read the message on her T-shirt: Hold your own … if you go limp.
I thought Linda would just take a suitcase and the dog with its small, rhythmic yips. But she kept moving through that coil of black smoke to get more, and I kept helping. “I heard it’s been burning for days,” she said, looking out to the hills. I set the crate in the footwell behind my seat.
There was a toaster oven, three sets of hot rollers, and framed posters of drag race cars. She wanted the magazines. I pulled my collar up and tried to breathe through my shirt when my hands weren’t full. Finally we were back on the road. “It’s a straight shot,” she said.
A fine rain began and picked up pace, but that did nothing to the reek of burning rubber.
She said, “You ever been betrayed?”
I figured she mostly wanted to talk about herself. So I said, “You?”
“By my own son. The older they get, the more they think they know, right? Snooping in your drawers, your pockets, listening in on phone lines, seeing what they can pry loose like they want to know who you really are when all they’re up to is finding a way to get back at you about one thing or another. I was sure my son was out with his friends when I was on the phone, you know, breaking it off with this man. It ripped me pretty bad because I thought we might have had a chance in this sick world, but I told him I was staying with my husband for my son’s sake. I was going to keep putting up with the drinking and the hunting even when it wasn’t the season and his damn meth cooking in the basement like I’m supposed to spend my nights waiting to blow up while I’m making supper. Anyway, my son came up to the kitchen just then and pulled the phone from my grip and hung up the receiver. He said he was going to tell Willis, that’s my husband, his father, when Willis got home from the gun show. So I just loaded up the car. No reason I should get a beating for staying loyal, you know? I’ve been beat enough.”
A loopy kind