Disappearing

Roz wasn’t much in the good choices department, her Tante Gida often said. Tante Gida was a goading, bitter woman, but Roz guessed she was right. If one thing was clear, though, it started the night her parents disappeared.

Disappeared was everyone else’s word, but Roz at eleven knew disappeared wasn’t quite right: she knew that they were suspended under the Gansett River in their car near the War Memorial bridge, just as she knew that it hadn’t been an accident. She went along with everyone’s idea of disappearing because, in the end, it was the same thing.

That’s when she came to live with her Tante Gida who spent full days at the kitchen table, cutting articles from newspapers and pasting them into her notebooks as she tsk-tsked the air between her teeth, disgusted with it all. Sometimes, Roz brought a book to the table. She was too distracted to read, and soon enough, Gida would turn to her and say, “Haven’t you somewhere to be?”

Exactly four days before her thirteenth birthday, Gida told her they’d found something in the woods: bones and teeth. They’d found her father, too, living in a cabin less than a hundred miles away. “Good-for-nothing drunk,” Gida spat. “He’ll get what for.”

Then Roz began walking the paths that flanked the Gansett. A woman who lived among the group of tents under the War Memorial took to her, talking at her as they wandered the banks. Sometimes, to keep the woman from getting bored with her silence, Roz sipped from the woman’s paper bag, a piercing warmth she knew was both temporary and trouble.

She didn’t hide the drinking from Tante Gida who wrung her hands and retreated to her room. When Roz came home one day with her own paper bag, Gida smashed the bottle against the floor and left in her car. For two days, she was gone, and on the morning of the third, Roz collected Gida’s notebooks and dug a pit in the overgrown backyard. She scanned the articles: all about the ways people were terrible to each other. With a splash of gasoline, she set it all ablaze.

When Gida returned that night and saw her notebooks were gone, when Roz admitted to what she’d done, Gida screamed and screamed, then fled in her car. Roz sank to the floor, her heart seizing, her breath gone. She flailed at her chest and as she grew faint, swore to God she’d let her Tante Gida be.

They settled into a quiet truce then, like inmates sharing a cell ticking off their time. On warm nights, Roz started sleeping on a mattress of cardboard under the bridge with the others who accepted her coming and going with an almost tender indifference.

One day, Roz found herself attending a community college, though she couldn’t explain why they’d accepted her or why she was going. She just went with it, just as she allowed Jack Burno to kiss her and a little bit more when he found her alone in the library stacks. They dated for a while, if it could be called that. She bore it out, his cruelty in the form of an STD, or the disinterested way he talked to her, or how he couldn’t kiss her. Eventually, he tired and left.

Then came red-haired Jerry, his eyes wild, who was married and pushing forty. She was just playing around, she told herself, but she knew she was hoping he’d leave his wife, a kind woman and a children’s librarian who didn’t deserve any of this.

She tried polyamory, only to find it was a man’s excuse to fuck around guilt-free. She tried monogamy and found men still fucked around, and most were guilt-free.

When her car’s check engine light came on, she brought it to the dealer where the salesman who walked with a limp and whose eyes were as large and soft and sad as a cow’s convinced her to lease a new car with money she didn’t have and a loan she couldn’t afford. A week later, drunk on her twenty-fifth birthday, she drove the car into an embankment and totaled it. In the ambulance, strapped to the backboard, she gazed up at the paramedic who promised she’d be okay. He had trustworthy eyes, this one. Eyes so dark in a face even darker. She lifted her hand, and he cupped it between his.

He was right, she was okay, and when she was released the next day, she tracked him down at the firehouse. For a time, they dated, and he was a good man. He saved lives, and she thought he might save hers, too. But the more she saw him, the worse she felt. It was an inverse hunger, as if she were filling herself on food that only left her more empty. She called him all the time; she texted even more. She couldn’t stop herself though she knew how it would end. He broke up, and when she continued to text and call, he blocked her.

She picked up a guy at a bar, took him home, then threw up in her toilet after the sex. When she eventually returned to the bedroom, he’d disappeared just as she hoped he would. The next weekend, it was the same. Puking and returning to an empty bed.

But the puking didn’t stop with the hookups, and she knew what it was all about. She was on the pill, but she forgot to take it often enough. She tried not to think about it, knowing she’d need to decide very soon. A few days later, with a rush of blood in the toilet, she wept and wept and wept.

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