it smelled like something was burning or dead. The undercarriage dripped and black oil pooled everywhere we parked. Before, when she picked up Lola from a play date, Mom used to pull into her friends’ driveways, but now she made a point of parking on the street—sometimes on the other side of the street or down the block.
Another letter arrived.
Dear Mona,
So I said I’d tell you a story about my Uncle Sorohan, my mother’s brother. I knew him during his carny years, but before that he was a roustabout with a circus, when he was even younger than you are now. Uncle Sor had an old fedora he never took off, even in the tub and even when he went to bed. His face was deeply lined from all the cigarettes he smoked and years of being outdoors, and he was a hardworking man but also a true romantic.
He often stayed for a night or two if he was on his way through town, and one time, I must have been five or six, he drove a flatbed to our house with a tall wooden cabinet painted red and roped in the back so it stood straight up and down. The cabinet had a few crude paintings with oriental dragons on one side and a woman in a kimono with a strange stare painted on the other. In the front was a door. I guess it was inevitable that a boy of five or six would get curious, and so after dinner Sor found me in the flatbed, trying to peek inside the box.
You know my father drank rashly, and he had worked himself up and warned my uncle at dinner that he better get that thing out of the drive early so he could move his patrol car sitting in the garage.
When Sor found me up in the flatbed, he climbed up and opened the door to the cabinet and asked if I’d like to disappear. There was a makeshift seat inside, like a phone booth without a phone.
“Where would I go?” I said.
“That’s the question. Where do we go when we disappear? I believe I disappeared into the circus, but you might disappear into the police force where your father hides out if you aren’t careful.”
“No, where do I go if I disappear in the box, Uncle Sor?”
“Oh, the box. You go somewhere else. I’m not really sure. I hear it’s quite pleasant, but I wouldn’t recommend it for everyone. The last man who tried it stayed away for years until a magician came along with the right spell. When he tumbled back into the box finally, and his wife asked where he had been, he seemed too happy to speak. Here, help me with these ropes.”
Soon we had the magic disappearing box out of its anchors and I was helping him bring it into the house. It was surprisingly light. As soon as my father saw it, he blew up at my uncle for being a bad influence and stirring up one kind of trouble or another. My mother did what she could to calm him. But Uncle Sor just ignored my father the way he always did. He directed me to turn to the left and then the right and watch the top stair so we would clear the bannister. We put the box at the foot of my bed.
“I’m going to leave this with you for a while,” he said. “Now, you need the spell so you’ll be able to come back if you try it out and there are no magicians around.” And so he gave me this: “Upon the brimming water among the stones are nine-and-fifty swans.”
I heard the basement door slam, and I knew my father had gone down to the family room, where he had built a saloon and where he would drink, mumbling to himself, and fall asleep with his head on the bar, hating the world. My uncle went down to the living room to sit with my mother and talk in whispers—I imagine trying to convince her again that she should leave my father.
The next day my uncle was gone before dawn and my father went off to work and my mother made me lunch and I was off to school. It was the following weekend my father went out with his buddies and came home stinking drunk and went after my mother and me as if he were invading an enemy camp.
After my mother had given me a cold compress for my face and after she had taken her quiet medicine, she stretched out on her bed with her own ice pack. I went back to my room and got inside the box, and that’s when I discovered the trapdoor. If I lifted up the floor using this tiny bit of rope in one corner, I could crawl into a box in the bottom that had air holes drilled into the back.
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
