Page 26 of The Art of Vanishing

Claire

My head was going to explode.

The voice of Luna’s teacher was booming through the speakers of the school-issued laptop that we’d picked up in the parking lot of her prekindergarten the week after the museum had closed.

She’d since been engaged in “virtual school,” which was currently a racket of shrieks and shouts as the dogged teacher attempted to teach them a song through the screen.

Luna had quickly learned where the volume buttons were and enjoyed turning them up and down with abandon.

Gracie’s crafty side had awoken in the last few weeks and she was currently bent over the sewing machine she had picked up in the basement of our building and nursed back to health.

For days, she’d unscrewed, cleaned, and reinstalled each piece of the machine.

When she finally dared to plug it in and turn it on, sure enough, it roared to life.

And I mean roared . The thing made so much noise when she got it up and running that I wondered if its previous owners had discarded it because it was simply too darn loud, and our apartment was feeling smaller by the day.

And then there was me. For the first time in I didn’t even know how long, I didn’t have anything to be doing next. So here I was, lying on the couch, staring up at the ceiling, losing my mind.

Of course, the list of options of what I could spend my time on was endless.

I could deal with the dishes from lunch that were just sitting in the sink.

I could get a jump start on dinner. I could clean that weird corner of the tub where the grout would never go back to white.

I could brush my teeth, which I wasn’t sure I’d done this morning.

The days were blending together; I was losing sense of what had happened this morning, yesterday morning, last week.

Chug, chug, chug went Gracie’s sewing machine. Luna was now clapping together a pot and a wooden spoon, two of the “learning items” the teacher had asked us to gather for this week’s set of lessons. What she was learning at this very moment, I couldn’t quite say.

“Gracie, do you think you could wait to do that?” I shouted.

“What?” she yelled back, not taking her eyes off her work for a moment.

“Never mind,” I said, mostly to myself. I went back to my ceiling staring. I wondered what Jean was doing at this exact moment, with no museum visitors to gawk at him. Was he frozen in place or could he roam free? Was he freer than me?

“Okay, everyone, that’s it for today! I’ll see you again tomorrow!

Have a good night and go be helpful to your mommies, daddies, guardians!

” Luna’s teacher was incredibly sweet and incredibly underpaid for the work she was putting in to teach these kids through a screen.

I bet she indulged in a good ceiling-staring session every now and then too.

Behind us, Gracie had packed up her work for the day and had gone into our bedroom.

She normally napped around this time of the afternoon.

With the absence of the crashing sewing machine and the enthusiastic preschool Zoom, the apartment returned to a state of calm.

Luna climbed onto my lap, lying against my chest. I felt two small hands on my cheeks, dragging my eyeline over until I was face-to-face with my mini me.

“What can I do for you, Miss Luna?” I asked.

“Hi, Mommy,” she replied, keeping her tiny, tender grip on my jaw.

“Hi, Moon. What do you want to do now?” The buzzer buzzed, a noise I found particularly scary because it had been weeks since I’d heard it.

“Hold on a second, let Mommy deal with this.” I plopped her down on the floor and she tottered off.

I wondered if one of the neighbor’s boxes was mistakenly getting dropped at our door.

I pressed my finger to the side of the buzzer that allowed me to talk to whoever was standing at the door. “Hello?” I asked, quickly switching over to the listening button.

“Claire…” a familiar voice started. My hand dropped immediately, silencing whatever he was saying next. I turned to make sure Luna hadn’t heard anything, but she was happily emptying her basket of toys I’d just put away back onto the floor. The buzzer rang again.

“Stop buzzing. I’ll come down in a minute,” I said into it, grateful I didn’t have to hear a response unless I allowed it in. I walked over to Luna, leaving her mess be for now. “Moon, why don’t you go lie down with Grandma for a moment?”

“But I don’t want to sleep,” she protested.

“Of course not, you don’t have to sleep!” I was used to this one. “You can just lie there with your eyes closed. You can even take my spot. When you’re done resting, we can play any game you want.”

This little bribe appeased her and she zipped off to bed. Once I made sure she was snuggled in, I whispered to Gracie that I’d be back in a minute. She waved me off and curled around Luna, both of their bodies looking small and safe under our comforter.

I put on shoes for the first time in days and decided to grab a jacket on my way out the door, having no idea what the temperature would be outside. Our neighborhood was crowded and hard to navigate without bumping into anyone, and an abundance of caution kept us indoors most of the time.

I opened the front door to find Jeremy leaning against the railing on the opposite side of the tiny porch in front of our building.

My stomach lurched at the sight of him—the first time I’d laid eyes on him in years.

He stood and made to step closer to greet me, but I held up an outstretched palm, an unspoken instruction to stay where he was.

There were maybe six feet between us if we were lucky and although we were outside, the experts came up with new guidelines daily for how not to spread the disease. I wasn’t taking any chances.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, no pleasantries possible in this conversation.

“Wow,” he said. “It’s great to see you. You look great.”

“ What, ” I repeated, “are you doing here?”

“Look,” he said, rubbing his hand against the back of his neck. I remembered this, his tell. “I know I messed up.”

I couldn’t believe how unoriginal this conversation was.

My life had become a fantasy and here I was, in a scene that could have been plucked from a badly written made-for-TV movie.

It was harder to believe he was here, standing on my porch, so close to my safe space, than it was to believe I had the power to go inside a painting.

But I wouldn’t let him see my feathers ruffled by his sudden appearance.

“You didn’t mess up,” I corrected him. “You left. You left without a word and you never came back.”

“Well.” He tried for that charming smile that used to make me weak in the knees, but I knew better now. I knew so much better. “I’m back now, aren’t I?”

“No,” I said bluntly. “No, you are not. We do not need you, we do not want you here, and there’s a freaking global pandemic. Even if you were a better man, it’s not safe.”

“She’s my daughter too, Claire,” he pleaded. “You keep saying ‘we’ but do you really think that’s what’s best? For her to never know her dad? What would she choose?”

“I don’t know what’s best, but I do know you made that choice for her when you walked out that door. You’re probably only back because you want something. And when you get what you need, you’ll be gone again.”

“It’s not like that. I don’t need anything.

I’ve just—I’ve had a lot of time to think, these past few weeks.

I miss her. And I want to know her again.

It’s okay if it’s on whatever terms you say.

I’ll stay inside, quarantine or whatever.

You tell me. Look,” he said, pulling a slip of paper out of his pocket.

“This is my number. You think about it and give me a call. I’ll be around.

You just let me know what works for you.

” He reached out to hand it to me, but I didn’t take it.

He left it on the ground near my feet like an offering.

I stared at it like it was a dead bug I’d need to deal with before Luna asked if it was okay and cried at the inevitable circle-of-life explanation I’d have to give. Jeremy was already making his way down the front steps. I called out to him. “You missed a lot.”

He turned around. “Let me make it up to you, Claire, to both of you. I’ll make things right.

You’ll see…” He turned again and walked down the street, out of our neighborhood.

I hadn’t watched him walk away the first time; he’d snuck out while Luna and I were asleep, tearing our lives apart in the most cowardly way possible.

The abandonment had crushed me back then; now, more than three years later, I knew it was for the best. Long before he’d walked out the door, I could tell he didn’t love me and he resented Luna.

And he didn’t deserve either of us. He’d only lasted a few months into life as a family of three.

Luna was too young to remember any of it, though she asked about her daddy every once in a while.

Now he was back. And as much as I didn’t want to admit he was right, it wasn’t just up to me. I shoved the piece of paper into my pocket. His handwriting was familiar in that even though it had been years since I’d seen it, it looked like all boys’ handwriting.

I wondered what Jean’s handwriting looked like.

I had never gotten the chance to see it.

I thought it must be so different from this chicken scratch.

If I ever got back in there, I’d make him write something down for me.

Maybe I’d even try to carry it out with me when I left, some little part of him I could hold when he was gone.