Page 15 of The Art of Vanishing

Claire

I gripped the counter in the break room, leaning in with my full body weight, trying to force the contact of the linoleum against the palms of my hands to bring me back to reality. Not that I even knew what reality was anymore. Clearly my understanding of that word was at an all-time low.

Did I just kiss him? I tried to remember the last time I had gone in for a kiss, like, really gone for it and I came up with…nothing. Had I ever initiated a kiss before? Sure, I’d been kissed but that was different. This kiss was like something out of a movie.

I had known all night that Jean wanted to kiss me; he was all but saying the words out loud every time he looked into my eyes.

And I wanted to kiss him too. I wanted to move closer to him, to let him know that somehow, when we were together, I felt both safe and like I was on the adventure of a lifetime.

I’d never felt like this before. That was the kind of thing that happened to other people, not to me.

Speaking of other people, I looked down at the ring on my left hand.

The stupid, clunky thing that had taken up so much more of my life than I’d ever meant to give it.

It had only ever been a placeholder for a better life, an empty promise Jeremy had never planned to keep.

He threw it my way to keep me from leaving him before he could leave me, never intending we’d actually get married.

Why had I kept it on for all these years?

Wishful thinking that he wasn’t the scumbag that taking it off implied he was?

Or an insurance policy, so I could always sell it and buy us a few more weeks if things got really bad?

If that was all it was, I could keep it somewhere else and live without the constant reminder of his failings.

I turned my hand upside down and allowed it to slide off, clattering onto the counter.

I flexed my fingers a few times, before I heard the recognizable shuffle of Linda’s feet in the hallway.

I shoved the ring down into the pocket of my jumpsuit.

“Howdy,” I said as she entered the room.

If I could have stared at my own self in disbelief, I would have.

I had never said the word howdy in my entire life.

I could feel all the wine we’d drunk tonight; it was making my heart race and my head swim.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d drunk more than a beer.

It must have been years. I needed to keep it together.

Linda rightfully looked at me like I was an alien. “Hello,” she replied. “You doing okay, kiddo?”

“Fine!” I practically shouted. “I’m fine,” I repeated at a more normal volume. “How are you?” Anything to get the attention off me, at least for a moment.

“Same old, same old,” she said. “Just how I like it. You settling in okay? I feel like I haven’t seen you as much lately.”

“Totally. I think I’ve got the hang of this place now,” I joked. Boy, oh boy, did I have the hang of it. I grabbed the counter behind me to keep my body from swaying. I would be waiting out in my car tonight until I was sober enough to drive home.

“Pretty sure the only reason you beat me here tonight was I found a particularly sticky corner of room four. Some kid must have dumped out an entire juice box or something like that.”

“Oh, yeah,” I quickly agreed. “I’m nowhere near as fast as you.”

“Mmm,” Linda assessed. “Or, you’re just more easily distracted. You still looking at the art every time?”

“Sometimes,” I lied.

“That’ll wear off at some point. You’ll get used to it.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t see this getting old any time soon.” If only she knew, I thought.

“Meh, a job’s a job.”

She had a point there. At the end of the day, this was work. And I had to keep the work up in order to keep having access to this place and these paintings.

“You doing anything for the holiday?” she asked.

“No, I’ll just be here, working. I mean, I guess we’re closed tomorrow, but I’ll be here the other days. You?”

“I’m going to my sister’s; she’s local, though. It’ll be a few hours of absolute madness and then I’ll get to drive back and sleep in my own bed. You won’t even go somewhere for dinner? Nothing festive?”

“We’ll just stay home. It’s too much food for our tiny family and I’m not much of a cook, so we’ll probably just order takeout from whatever’s open.

It’s okay, we don’t mind. We love pizza.

” Did Linda notice that I always said “we”?

It was habit at this point. Honestly, the only place I didn’t fall into that word choice was with Jean, in the painting. In there, it was just me.

“Well, that’s nice,” Linda said. “Everyone has their own version of tradition.”

I was hit with a wave of sadness that I wouldn’t get to spend the holiday with Jean.

I wondered if the people in the art even knew what Thanksgiving was, or if they lived by the same calendar we did.

I imagined a grand spread, this colorful cast of characters pushing together every table they could find in this place, heavy with a hodgepodge of different painted foods.

It would be loud and exciting, a contrast to Jean’s quietness, but we’d be there together.

I could see him, slowly coming out of his shell, getting into it the way he had earlier that night.

Then I tried to picture him in my own Thanksgiving, sitting on the couch between me and Gracie, a greasy pizza box half-empty on the coffee table, the apartment haphazardly picked up minutes before his arrival.

It didn’t work. Not because of Jean, I’m sure he would be as sweet as possible, but because the picture just never fully formed in my brain.

It was too many different pieces—our overworn couch, the leather nearly splitting in places; the dark spots in the dirty light fixture that Gracie couldn’t reach to clean; Jean’s three-piece suit; his shyness that came across as formality when you first got to know him. He’d never see that home side of me.

“You look sad, chicken,” Linda said, tapping my shoulder consolingly. “It’s just a silly holiday. It’s okay if your family looks different from the rest of the world.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, letting her think that was what was getting me down. And honestly, she wasn’t far off from the truth. My reality, if you could call it that, looked so unbelievably different from the rest of the world.

“Well, I’m going to head out,” she said as she unlocked her locker and retrieved her purse. “And you should too. I’ll see you later, kid.” She rummaged around in her bag, pulling her car keys out of a mess of headphone wires and gum packets.

“You too,” I said, but she was already gone, back to the outside world. It was so strange: tonight, I was sure everything had changed. But Linda just looked at me and spoke to me like everything was the way it always was.

I poured myself a cup of the shitty coffee and wondered, not for the first time, was I really the only one who could see them moving around?

Or who could crawl through the frames? I considered for a moment if I should show Linda what I could do.

What if it wasn’t just something special about me?

What if we all could do it but no one else had dared to try?

She wouldn’t get it. I liked Linda, I considered her a friend. But she would think I was out of my mind if I even started to try to explain it. And Linda liked rules. What if she somehow stopped me from going back? It wasn’t worth the risk.

I pressed my hand against my pocket. I felt the outline of the ring through the fabric, touching the skin on my finger that now felt naked. No, not naked. Free.