Now You See Her Page 0,29

sad. The world is such a cruel place. And sometimes I feel such despair. For you. For Judith. For all of us.” She slammed the closet door shut, then immediately opened it again, then closed it, then opened it.

“I’m going to get Daddy.”

“No. Don’t do that.”

“But I’m scared. You’re scaring me.”

“Oh, sweetheart. There’s nothing to be scared about. Everything’s going to be just fine. I heard the most wonderful thing on TV last night. This doctor was on the news and he predicted they’re this close to discovering a cure for cancer. And you’ll see. It’ll happen in your lifetime. Probably not in mine. But for sure in yours. People will live much longer than they do today. You could actually live to be two hundred years old, maybe even forever. It’s not impossible. And you’re such a sweet girl, Marcy. So lovely and sweet. You deserve to live forever. If only we could do something about your hair. So much hair for such a tiny face.”

Marcy pushed the hair away from her forehead, sitting up in her bed at the Doyle Cork Inn, staring at the clock radio on the tiny nightstand beside her, trying not to see her mother’s pained expression. Almost four a.m. Still another few hours before it got light. She flopped back down, flipped from one side to the other, then back again, hearing echoes of her mother’s closet door as it opened and closed, opened and closed.

“I’ve made such a mess of things,” her mother was saying, sobbing uncontrollably now. “I’ve let everybody down.”

“No, you haven’t.”

“Yes, I have. Look at me. What have I accomplished? Nothing. I have nothing.”

“You have Daddy. You have me and Judith.”

Her mother stared at her as if she could see right through her, as if she didn’t exist. “I had to have a Caesarian section with Judith,” she said. “Did I ever tell you about that?” She continued, not waiting for a reply. “It was horrible. They gave me this horrible, big needle—they insert it right into your spine—and it’s supposed to freeze you from the waist down, except they gave me too much and it froze me right up to my chest, and it felt as if I couldn’t breathe, and I was crying, telling them I couldn’t breathe, but the doctors insisted I was breathing just fine, even though it felt like I was dying. Can you understand? I thought I was dying. And I was so scared. I was so scared,” she repeated, her shoulders shaking with the ferocity of her sobs.

And then she suddenly dropped to the floor, curled into a tight fetal ball, and fell fast asleep.

She slept for the rest of the day, and the next morning she was gone.

“Where’s Mom?” Marcy remembered asking when she came downstairs for breakfast.

Judith shrugged, cutting the omelet their father had made her into tiny pieces, then lifting a forkful of the eggs to her mouth and returning it to her plate untouched. “Away.”

“Where’d she go?”

“Where she usually goes,” Judith replied.

Which meant nobody knew. Periodically, their mother simply disappeared. Usually for a period of several weeks. Sometimes less, occasionally more. Nobody ever knew where she went. Their father had stopped trying to find her after the first few times, stopped reporting her disappearances to the police, stopped hiring detectives to find her, stopped searching through homeless shelters and checking the dirty and raggedly dressed bodies asleep on downtown sewer grates. Once, when Marcy was in her teens and out with a group of friends from school, she thought she saw her mother rifling through a garbage bin outside a store window, but she turned away before she could be sure and quickly ushered her friends to another location.

Her father had tried to explain, using the accepted parlance of the day. “Your mother is manic-depressive. There’s nothing to worry about. She’s not going to die. She’s not dangerous. She just gets very excited and then she gets very depressed. But as long as she takes her medication, she’ll be able to function just fine.”

Except she hated her medication. It made her feel as if she were, in her words, “trying to do the butterfly stroke in a vat of molasses.” And so she’d stop taking it. And then the cycle would begin again: the wild mood swings, the talking too fast and interrupting too much, the unrelenting intensity that accompanied even the most mundane of acts, the hysterical fits of laughter, the terrifying crying jags, the sudden falling