The Moment She Was Gone

4

My father used to smoke incessantly.

I loved to watch him paint.

I have seen many movies about painters, some famous, some striving to become famous, and none of them have ever seemed convincing to me. When my father painted, there was nothing but him and the canvas. He was utterly alone with the canvas. I would come home from school and walk into the spare bedroom of our apartment, on the north side, where the light was good, and he would be standing at the easel wearing jeans and sandals and a blue smock like the ones French street cleaners wear, and which I think he actually bought in Paris, I know he had dozens of them, all of them paint-spattered. The smocks themselves looked like one of his canvases.

We were still living in the building on Seventy-second Street at the time — yes, the one where Mr. Alvarez was super — and he would always ask me when I came home from school, “Is your father still painting?” and I would say, “Yes, he is, Mr. Alvarez,” because what else would my father be doing but painting? I sometimes thought he painted day and night. I sometimes thought he never slept. All he did was paint and smoke his little Brazilian cigars, which he called in a thick fake Spanish accent, “gringo steenkers,” blowing out clouds of smoke and grinning like one of the banditos in Treasure of the Sierra Madre. He was never without one of those little cigars in his mouth. Never. He would lean in close to the canvas, as if scrutinizing each dollop of paint he applied with putty knife or brush or even thumb, squinting at every new stroke, puffing on the cigar, backing away, dipping into the riot of color on the enamel tray he used as a palette, lunging at the canvas again, puffing, painting. I loved to watch him paint.

He was a large man, my father — I talk about him as if he’s dead, when I know he’s not — and he overwhelmed the easel and the canvas and the tiny room in which he was permitted to work. But even later, when he was recognized and rich and had built for himself the huge studio in Connecticut, he triumphed over this larger space with the sheer bulk of his size and the energy of his attack upon each oversized canvas. He always painted big. Fair-haired and pale-eyed, he slashed at the canvas like a Viking invader hacking a hapless black-Irish peasant to bits, trailing a wide red gash here, exploding a burst of white there, dipping his thumb into burnt umber or cobalt blue, poking it at the canvas as if gouging out an eye. The flaxen hair and blue eyes in fact bespoke of fierce Norwegian ancestry, not for nothing had Norsemen once sailed up the river Shannon. The gentleness of his spirit murmured of something quite else. Soft green hills and drifting mist. Smooth brown whiskey. A lullaby on a moonless night. A keening graveside woman. My father’s soul was Irish to the core.

When he read to us at night...

I have to tell you, first, that he loved to play board games with us. Along around five-thirty or six each evening, he would come out of his studio (he called even the tiny back room a “studio”), stinking of cigar smoke and turpentine, and even before my mother called us to dinner he would say, “Hey, kiddos, some Monopoly after supper?” (He still called dinner “supper,” the way Grandma Kate always did.) Or Risk, which was another game. Or Clue. My mother would always tell us to finish our homework first, but every night, nonetheless, we would sit down to play a board game for an hour or so after dinner.

My sister didn’t like playing board games. “Are you bored, darlin?” my father would ask her. (He was an inveterate punster, which my mother said was his way of taking revenge on the English language, the same way she maintains sarcasm is her way of doing it.) Annie was indeed bored, and a punster in her own right. “No, Dad, just Terry-fied of losing,” she would say, making a pun on my father’s name, which Aaron never seemed to get even though it had become a standard response to my father’s board/bored question. A fiercely competitive player, Aaron was too busy concentrating on the game itself, whichever game it happened to be. Whenever he was losing, he would knock the board and all its pieces off the table. “Oop-a-la!” my father would shout, and burst out laughing, but my mother would send Aaron to his room, anyway.

At night, after we had carefully put whichever game away, its pieces still in position for the next night’s foray, we would go into the room Aaron and I shared, which was larger than Annie’s, and we would curl up on one of the beds, and my father would read to us. He read all sorts of bedtime stories to us, but his favorite — and ours as well — was The Once and Future King. Even Aaron liked this one, though I think at first he identified with Kay, “who was too dignified to have a nickname” and who would be called Sir Kay when he grew older. Aaron didn’t know, of course, that the Wart would grow up to be King Arthur.

There were four volumes in the book, but my father read only the first one to us, and so we didn’t learn anything about the interlocking Arthurian tales of incest and infidelity. Neither did any of us have the slightest inkling that at this exact moment in time our father was “playing around,” as my mother later explained it to us, and might therefore have had an affinity for the Guinevere-Lancelot parts of the story, if ever he’d got around to reading those to us, which he never did. What interested us about The Sword in the Stone, as this first volume was called, was not T. H. White’s concern with force majeure (which we wouldn’t have recognized if it came up behind us and hit us on the head with a club) but instead the way he and Merlin together worked their magic.

Aaron was eight years old in that year before my father abandoned us. Annie and I were each four. In the soft light from the lamp beside Aaron’s bed, we listened to my father’s liquid voice as he began reading to us yet another time, crediting the book and its author each and every night before continuing with the story — “This is The Once and Future King, by T. H. White” — and then conjuring for us the twelfth-century England White had created.

Spellbound, we listened.

This was the opening epigraph of the first volume, and my father read it with portentous intonations proper to the magical proceedings that would follow.

“Who’s Grandma Marie?” Annie asked.

“It’s Gram-a-ree,” my father said. “It’s White’s name for England. It also means magic.”

“Who’s Merlin?” Aaron asked.

“A magician,” my father said. “Are you going to listen to this, or shall we just turn out the lights and go to bed?”

“What does ‘Where you and I shall fare’ mean?” I asked.

“In a minute, it’s going to mean fare thee well.”

“What’s fare thee well?” Annie asked.

“It’s good night, Toots,” my father said.

“Is Toots a pun?” Annie asked.

The minute Daddy got famous, he bought a house in Connecticut. Paintings that were earlier selling for $3,000 a week before were this week selling for $100,000, and a week after that for $300,000. At great cost, he transformed some old stables on the property into a spacious studio with terrific skylights, where he could smoke his smelly little Brazilian cigars while he painted all day long and sometimes deep into the night. (I always thought he and Grandma Rozalia smelled exactly alike with their tobacco stink. Except Daddy had a turpentine smell besides.)

My mother got not only the house in the divorce settlement, but also the studio and everything in it. This came to quite a bit of change; when she locked him out of her house and her life, there were paintings valued at two-million-five stacked in the old carriage house. She promptly sold all the paintings (“Good riddance to bad rubbish!” she announced) and moved all of us back full-time to the apartment we still kept in New York. But at first, we continued to use the house during the summer months. And one summer, when Aaron was fourteen, and my sister and I were ten, someone broke into the house one night.

We didn’t know this had happened until the next morning, when we were all sitting down to breakfast and Aaron was going out to get the New York Times from the mailbox, and he noticed that one of the glass panels on the back door to the house, the kitchen door, was smashed. My mother suspected at once that it was my “no-good father,” as she called him, even though all evidence had him living in San Miguel de Allende with an Irish girl who was purportedly his new model and mistress. I later saw one of the paintings he’d done of her during that time in his life. Actually, I went looking for it in MOMA’s permanent collection. Even given my father’s abstractionist bent, Molly O (the name of the painting and the girl) was identifiably redheaded, green-eyed, and blessed with three abundant breasts, surely hyperbole.

My mother called Mr. Schneider, the contractor who had renovated the stables when we first bought the house. A portly little man with a heavy German accent, he kept telling my mother she should keep up with house repairs, that it was a “zad t’ing” (I can’t do accents) to see a fine old house “like zis one” fall into neglect. She always pooh-poohed his concern. I don’t think she’d even have had the glass panel replaced if its absence wasn’t letting in bugs at night. Mr. Schneider came over with a glazier the next day, and stood with his hands on his hips, watching the man as he replaced the glass panel, clucking his tongue every now and then, perhaps thinking something like this would never have happened in his native Germany.

Two nights later, someone broke into the house again.

This time, a different panel on the back door was broken.

We figured that whoever was trespassing had broken the glass so he could reach in and turn the simple spring latch on the door. The odd thing was that nothing was missing from the house, and no one had heard anyone coming in or going out. The bedroom my mother used to share with my father was on the second floor of the house, at the end opposite the ground floor kitchen. Besides, she was a sound sleeper, so it wasn’t surprising that she hadn’t heard anything. Annie slept right down the hall from her, in a room just over the kitchen. If anyone could have heard the intruder, it was Annie. But she claimed she had heard nothing. Aaron and I shared a room on the third floor of the house, m what used to be the attic. Neither of us had heard any sound of glass breaking, or doors opening, or anything of the sort, but after the third nocturnal visit, we both started listening very hard. That was the last break-in, though, the third one. Mr. Schneider brought his glazier over after each time, and stood by with his hands on his hips, clucking his tongue, while the glass panel was fixed.

My mother called the police after the third visit, but they were a Mickey Mouse department and they didn’t take fingerprints or anything, and besides it never happened again, so that was the end of that. My mother never surrendered her belief that my father had been breaking into the house out of Irish spite. Aaron and I figured a squirrel or a raccoon had been breaking the glass on the kitchen door, trying to get at the food in the pantry. Only Annie knew it wasn’t any squirrel or raccoon breaking that glass.

She told me years later that she used to sneak out of the house in her nightgown, and run down the hill through the trees, past Daddy’s studio to where the property joined the main road. There she would lie on her belly in the dark, watching automobiles speed by in the dead of night. Sometimes, when she got back to the house, she found the kitchen door locked behind her. She would break the glass panel just above the lock, and then reach in to open the door. Once she cut her hand. When she mentioned all this, I asked her why she would do such a thing. Leave the house in the middle of the night to go watch cars speeding by on the road below. She told me she thought Daddy might be coming back. She told me she was waiting for Daddy.

Now I wonder if my father was the start of it all.

Her neurosis, or whatever it is.

Whatever has caused her to run away again in the middle of the night.

In the summer of 1982, my mother took Annie and me to Europe. We visited Denmark and Sweden and Norway, the Scandinavian Tour, except that we never got to Finland because my mother said it was too close to Russia and this was still during the Cold War, and she was afraid there’d be a pogrom or something. It was in Stockholm, at our hotel, that my sister fell in love with an eighteen-year-old waiter named Sven. She was fifteen at the time. Our birthdays are in September, and this was in August.

“Oh, he’s so beautiful,” she used to tell me, which I guess he was, with my sister’s blond hair and green eyes, almost a third twin except that he was much taller than I, and spoke English with a marked accent. We were moving on to Norway the following week. My sister stared at Sven goggle-eyed and open-mouthed while he brought us double desserts. My mother thought it was cute, Annie being so smitten and all. I thought it was dangerous. I knew what eighteen-year-old boys wanted from beautiful young girls. Especially eighteen-year-old Swedish boys. When he asked her to go for a walk one night, my mother said Sure, why not, what’s the harm?

I followed them at a discreet distance. Well, not too discreet. I didn’t want to lose them. T didn’t want him working his Swedish charms on my unsuspecting little sister, my kid sister. I am five minutes older than she is. I chipped my collar bone coming out of my mother’s womb, preparing the way for both of us. They had to put me in an incubator. When the doctor came in to report this to my mother, he said, “One of your twins, the boy, is a little rocky, so we put him in an incubator.” A little rocky! His exact words. My mother almost expired on the spot. He was trying to tell her I’d experienced some discomfort breaking my collar bone. Anyway, he walked her by the lake, young Sven did. My fifteen-year-old sister. He kissed her by the lake. I wanted to strangle him. I kept watching. One false move...

But no, that was it.

That solitary kiss by the lake, under a full moon. And then he walked her back to the hotel, and... well, wait a minute... he kissed her once again. I watched her go up the steps into the hotel. I watched him looking after her as she disappeared. Then he put his hands in his pockets and walked away.

She sent him postcards every day.

It was as if my mother and I were no longer with her. All through Norway, she talked of him day and night. We’d be having lunch or dinner, she’d be scribbling postcards to him, sometimes three or four postcards a day. It was infuriating. And humiliating. We were invisible. His birthday was at the end of August, she wanted to send him a gift. We went shopping all one day, looking for an appropriate shirt for him. She made me try on six or seven shirts she liked, to see how they looked. I told her Sven was bigger than I was. She said, “That’s okay, I just want to get an idea.” Six or seven shirts. Maybe eight. She finally picked a lime-green, short-sleeved shirt she said would go well with his blond hair and green eyes. My mother thought all of this was cute, even though she was the one who paid for the shirt. In retrospect, this is not strange. She’s been paying for my sister’s voyage through life ever since.

We got back home at the beginning of September. There was no communication from Sven, not a letter, not a postcard, nothing. No acknowledgment that he had received any of her ten thousand postcards, no thank you for the lime-green birthday shirt, nothing. Our own birthday was on the eighteenth. My mother planned to throw a sweet-sixteen party for us. Annie and I insisted that we supply the music.

Our group was called The Boppers, which was a play on the expression “teeny-boppers” and a reference as well to the time-honored series of books about The Bobbsey Twins, not to mention a sidelong wink at “bop,” which was very far from the kind of music we were playing at the time. This was 1982, remember. The Beatles had broken up long ago. In fact, John Lennon had been killed almost two years ago. Paul McCartney had recorded a song called “Ebony and Ivory” with Stevie Wonder, and it was now the number-four song on the charts. The Boppers imitated it to perfection. We also played “Eye of the Tiger,” the Survivor hit, and “Don’t You Want Me” from the Human League, and we did a fair rendition of the Steve Miller Band’s “Abracadabra,” too. Not to mention all the Golden Oldies from when you and I were young, Gertie. Altogether, we weren’t a bad band.

I played bass guitar, and my sister played the tambourines and sang. She had a strong, clear voice, not unlike Janis Joplin’s, or so everyone, including me, told her. We used to rehearse in a church hall six blocks from the apartment we were still living in with my mother; Aaron was already off at college. We kept all our equipment at the church... well, not my guitar. But everything else. Tuners and amplifiers and speakers, and microphones, all the stuff every garage band in the nation, or perhaps the world, had to buy if they ever hoped to achieve instant stardom. My mother had paid for the equipment, of course. It had cost something like six thousand dollars.

Two days before our birthday, after we’d been rehearsing for close to ten days, my sister hocked all the equipment, bought herself a ticket to Stockholm, and ran off to meet her beloved Sven. Of course, we didn’t know where she’d gone at first. We just knew she was gone. Aaron was the one who suggested that she’d gone in search of her “inamorato,” the exact word he used. This was confirmed at the beginning of October, when we received a postcard from an island called Visby. It read, “Can’t find Sven, moving on, love to you all. Annie.” Not even a happy birthday to me.

Not even that.

In retrospect, though, her search through the Scandinavian countries, and later London and Paris, was the shortest of all her excursions. She was still a minor at the time, and after my mother contacted the State Department, they were able to track her comings and goings through various ports of entry and finally located her in a seedy hotel on the Left Bank.

When my mother got her on the phone, she told her that unless she was on the next plane to New York, she would have the French police arrest her, a threat Annie apparently believed because, lo and behold, she showed up at the apartment two days later, looking none the worse for wear, and telling us smugly that there were far better-looking men than Sven Lindqvist in this wide world of ours. We thought she was cured of her adolescent crush as well as her recent wanderlust.

But after what happened in Sicily, I wonder if Annie accepted my mother’s threat of arrest only because the FBI had already entered the landscape of her mind.

“The New Year’s Eve Incident,” as the family later referred to it, took place in December of 1983, a bit more than three months after our seventeenth birthday. By then, I was going steady with a girl named Rosemary Quinn who was sixteen and a junior at Ambrose. Annie, being mean, said Rosemary probably still wore white cotton panties. She also said she probably didn’t know how to kiss, a misapprehension I didn’t bother to correct. I was taking Rosemary to a party on West Seventy-ninth Street that night. A twenty-one-year-old boy who was a senior at Dartmouth picked up Annie at nine o’clock and took her to a party in Greenwich Village. My mother, at the age of forty-one, had begun dating a bald lawyer Who was fifty-four years old and who lived in a white clapboard house overlooking a pond. She went to a party at his house in Larchmont, New York.

My mother and I were both home by four A.M.

Annie still wasn’t home by the time the sun came up.

Neither of us was particularly alarmed.

I made scrambled eggs (which were a bit runny, my mother kindly informed me) and she and I sat in the kitchen drinking coffee and eating and watching the sun come up over Manhattan. She told me Douglas Feingold was really a very nice man, but that she couldn’t see herself getting sexually involved with him (thank you for sharing that, Mom) and then she went into her “My Son the Doctor” routine (although Aaron was in Business Administration and not Pre-Med), kvelling about how well he was doing at Princeton where he would be starting his last semester next year (and incidentally meeting the future Mrs. Gulliver, young Gussie Manners serving up burgers at Ye Olde Mickey D’s). As I say, this was 1983 — well, 1984 already — and the cotton was high, and neither of us even thought to wonder about where the hell Annie might be until it occurred to me that it was almost nine A.M. on the first day of the new year, and no sign of her, and she hadn’t even called to say good morning and happy new year.

I asked my mother if she knew where Annie had been headed for with the twenty-one-year-old Dartmouth senior, and she said Annie had left a number...

“Which I’ve always insisted on,” she said.

... and she went fishing in the drawer under the wall telephone and found a slip of paper with the name Josh Levine scribbled on it, and a telephone number under that.

“Is this the Dartmouth guy’s name?” I asked. “Or the name of the guy where the party was?”

“The Dartmouth guy is a Wasp named Freddie Cole,” my mother said with some contempt, since she had always considered my father a Wasp even though he was a Catholic.

“Do you think Annie would be angry if we called her?”

“To wish her a happy new year?” my mother said.

“Well, to see if she’s okay.”

“Why wouldn’t she be okay?”

“I don’t know. It’s already nine, five after nine, in fact,” I said, looking at my watch again.

“Call her,” my mother said. “She’ll be happy to hear from us.”

I dialed the number on the scrap of paper. The phone rang once, twice, three times...

“Hello?”

A girl’s voice. At first I thought it was...

“Annie?”

“No, this is Irene.”

“Irene, hi, this is Andy Gulliver. Is my sister still there?”

“Who’s your sister?”

“Annie. She came there with... uh... Freddie Cole? Is he there?”

“Just a sec,” Irene said.

I waited.

My mother looked at me.

I shrugged.

“Hello?”

A man’s voice.

“Who’s this?” I asked.

“Freddie Cole.”

“Hi, Freddie, this is Annie’s brother. Could I speak to her, please?” There was a silence on the line.

“Freddie?”

“Yes?”

“Could I speak to my sister, please?”

“She’s resting,” Freddie said.

“Well... uh... could you get her, please? I’d like to talk to her.”

“Okay,” Freddie said.

He put the phone down, I heard it clattering on the table top or the counter or whatever. I heard voices, laughter, more voices. My mother looked at me again.

“He’s getting her,” I said.

“Where is she?”

“Resting.”

“What do you mean? You mean sleeping?”

“He said resting.”

“Who did?”

“Freddie.”

We kept waiting. I looked at my watch. It was ten minutes past nine. “Freddie?” I said into the phone, hoping he would hear my voice and pick up the receiver again. No one picked up. “Freddie!” I shouted into the phone. Nothing. No one. I whistled into the phone. I whistled louder. I could still hear voices and laughter in the background.

“Where is she?” my mother asked.

“I don’t know, Mom.”

She was already wearing a look I would come to know only too well in later years. A tight little mouth, a frown creasing her brow, puzzlement and suspicion in the green eyes, helplessness beginning to border on panic.

“Hello?”

“Annie?” I said.

Her voice sounded frail, distant, trancelike.

“Annie? Is that you?”

“Andy?”

“Yes, honey, what’s the matter?”

“Did Sven call yet?” she asked, and a chill went up my spine.

“What is it?” my mother asked.

“Annie,” I said, “where are you?”

In a voice that was lilting, almost sing-song, she said, “I don’t know, where am I? Has Sven called yet?”

“Annie, put Freddie on the line, okay?”

“Freddie?”

“The boy who took you to the party.”

“Freddie?”

“Freddie Cole. Please get him, Annie. And stay near the phone. Don’t go away, all right?”

“How can I get Freddie if I don’t leave the phone?” she asked, and began giggling.

“Just go get him, okay? Hurry, Annie!”

“Oh, okay,” she said in the same sing-song voice, and I heard the phone clattering down again.

“Andrew, what is it?” my mother said.

“I don’t know.”

“You were speaking to her, what do you mean you don’t...?”

“I’m trying to find out, Mom.”

“Where is she now?”

“She went to get him.”

“Let me talk to him.”

“He’s not here yet, Mom.”

“Well, where is he? Why’d you let her get off the phone? What the hell is...?”

“Hello?”

“Freddie?”

“Yes.”

“What’s wrong with my sister?”

“Nothing. Why? What’s wrong with her?”

“Is she drunk?”

“How do I know what she is?”

“Look, you son of a bitch...”

“Hey! Hey! Don’t you go...”

“Where are you? Where’s that party you’re at?”

“What is it?” my mother said.

“Just don’t go calling...”

“Give me the address there.”

“I don’t know the fucking address.”

“Get it! And fast!”

“What is it?” my mother said again.

In the taxi, I repeated every word of the conversation I’d had with Annie on the phone, and my mother kept saying over and over again, “It’s dope, they doped her.” I didn’t know if it was dope or not. I was seventeen and I had never so much as smoked a joint. I’m now thirty-six, and I admit to having smoked marijuana since, but only several times in my life, and then only because I didn’t want to seem like a spoil sport. When you’re in college, and everybody around you is smoking, you don’t want the girls to think you’re a wuss.

This was New Year’s Day, and there wasn’t any traffic at all in the streets. In fact, I think we were lucky even to find a cab. We made it down to Tenth Street in something like twelve minutes. The cabbie let us out in front of a brownstone in a row of similar buildings. I tipped him three dollars on an eight-dollar ride, and he wished us a happy new year and drove off. My mother looked suddenly old and frail. This was the second time I’d seen her look that way. The first was when Annie sold the band equipment and went flying off to Europe. In later years, this look would become commonplace. I realize now that Annie’s frequent disappearances made all of us look old before our time.

The guy who answered the door said he was Josh Levine. I figured him to be twenty-three or — four, a good-looking guy with curly black hair and brown eyes, wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the collar open, a red tie hanging loose on his chest. He said he was sorry for the way Freddie had behaved on the telephone, and he assured us that there was nothing to worry about, Annie had just consumed a little too much alcohol. “Consumed” was the exact word he used. (I later learned he had gone to Harvard. He told me that while we were waiting for the doctor.)

Freddie himself was nowhere in sight, God knew where the little prick had run off to. My mother looked around the place disapprovingly. There were ashtrays brimming with butts, many of which I recognized as roaches, and there was the sweetish smell of marijuana on the air — which I don’t think my mother detected as such — and there were girls and boys and women and men asleep on sofas or on strewn pillows all over the floor, and there were empty booze bottles and beer bottles, and a record player going with Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.” In the kitchen, a redheaded guy in his late forties, I guessed, was in very deep conversation with a girl who looked nineteen.

My sister was lying on her belly on a bed in a bedroom on the third floor of the building. She was still fully clothed, except for her shoes, but the back of her party dress was unzipped, and her bra clasp had been unfastened. I vowed at that moment that if I ever ran into Freddie Cole again, I would kill him. (I did, in fact, run into him five years later, at a singles bar in Brooklyn, when I was twenty-two and he was twenty-six. He was drunk, so I didn’t kill him.) I sat on the edge of the bed. My mother stood at the foot, shaking her head. Her face was deathly white, her green eyes glistening with anger. Downstairs, far away, another record dropped into place. Men at Work doing “Down Under.”

I shook my sister.

“Annie,” I said, “wake up.”

She rolled over. She tried to prop herself up. and then fell back against the pillow again.

“Annie,” I said, “wake up!”

She opened her eyes. Tried to focus. Recognized me. Smiled.

“Oh, hello,” she said. “Happy birthday.”

Dr. Aaron Tannenbaum had been our family doctor for as long as I could remember, but he wasn’t too tickled to be making a house call on New Year’s Day. He arrived at Josh Levine’s brownstone at a quarter to eleven that morning. Cleanly shaved, impeccably tailored, he looked as if he might be going to brunch in the Palm Court instead of paying a visit to a stranger’s apartment in the Village. Even the sight of two familiar faces — mine and my mother’s — did nothing to mollify him. He greeted my mother gruffly — “Happy new year, Helene” — and then without so much as a hello to me, even though he’d been treating me for acne for the past four years, he asked where Annie was.

We took him up to the third-floor bedroom.

Annie was still out. Dr. Tannenbaum asked me to leave the room. I waited in the hallway outside while he examined her. When he and my mother joined me some ten minutes later, he sighed heavily and said, “I don’t know what she’s ingested, but whatever it was, it was a massive dose. Get her out of here, take her home, and put her to bed.”

“Can’t we pump out her stomach?” my mother asked.

“Wouldn’t help a damn,” Tannenbaum said. “Whatever it was has already been absorbed into her blood stream. Put her to bed. And pray to God she doesn’t wake up a vegetable.”

Annie slept soundly for a bit more than thirty-six hours.

On the second of January in the year of our Lord 1984, she woke up, looked around her room, recognized my mother, recognized me, and in a very hoarse voice said, “Hi, what time is it?”

I told her it was eleven-thirty.

“Morning or night?” she asked.

“Night,” I said.

“Want to watch Johnny Carson?” she said.

“Sure,” I said.

“What’d you take?” my mother asked.

“Take?”

“Dr. Tannenbaum said you ingested a massive dose of some drug. What was it, Annie?”

“I have no idea, Mom.”

“Annie, you were unconscious for...”

“Mom, leave her...”

“I was not un...”

“Don’t tell me you have no idea what you took! You’re lucky we didn’t have your stomach pumped out!”

The room went silent.

“Somebody may have dropped something in my drink,” Annie said.

“Why would anyone do that?”

“How should I know? People do crazy things,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“To get even.”

“Get even? What are you talking about?”

“For being blond. And pretty. For having good breasts. Who the hell knows? People just do things. You have to watch yourself at all times. I’m hungry. Can I get something to eat?”

She wasn’t a vegetable.

But we still didn’t know what else she was.

What happened to Annie in our senior year at Ambrose Academy was admittedly a bad break, no pun intended.

I find it difficult to think of my mother as a Soccer Mom, especially since the term did not exist back then in 1984. But assuredly, that’s what she was. In March, you see, my sister had the good fortune — or bad, depending upon how you looked at it — to be elected co-captain of the soccer team, and it was in the fifth game of the season, as she was kicking the ball downfield toward the opposing team’s goal, that Annie was blindsided by two girls in yellow and blue tunics and shorts, and knocked off her feet head over teacups, to land at a peculiar angle that broke her left leg.

In her hospital room, her leg in a cast and supported by pulleys and ropes, she told me, “They were after me, Andy. The were out to get me.”

Actually, the girls who’d been responsible for the accident had come to the hospital only the day before, to apologize to Annie, and to tell my mother and me how sorry they were. I could not imagine that they’d been out to break Annie’s leg deliberately. These were prep school girls. Even professional athletes wouldn’t do anything so intentionally cruel. Would they?

“I’m telling you they were out to get me,” Annie insisted. “I should have listened.”

“What do you mean? Listened to who?”

“Haven’t you ever sensed that something was about to happen? I should have listened to my own inner thoughts. But butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths, you know?” she said, and here she fell into imitations of first the chunky redhead who was captain of the opposing team and next her slender blond co-captain, who in tandem had knocked Annie down. Annie’s impressions were dead on, and actually quite funny, both girls shaking hands with her and wishing her luck before the game started, both of them being oh-so-sportsmanlike and rah-rah private-school ladies while secretly planning all along to hit her simultaneously at the thigh and the shin, ensuring a broken leg. “The two-faced bitches,” Annie said.

“Annie, I’m sure they didn’t...”

“Oh, I’m sure they did,” she said, and handed me a Magic Marker and asked me to write something clever on her cast. I wrote “Give me a break, willya?” Annie thought it was funny.

She did not think the almost-two months she spent in a plaster cast to the hip was comical, however. Nor did she find even mildly amusing the additional six weeks she was forced to spend in a soft cast from her knee to her ankle. Riding the bus on crutches to and from school each day, she complained endlessly, becoming something of a kvetch who railed on about all the mean people in this world — “Like Blondie and her redheaded dyke girlfriend” — who couldn’t bear seeing anyone else getting ahead in life.

Before the accident, she’d been a very good student. In fact, as I recall those days now, they form my happiest memories. Annie and I riding to school together on the bus, telling jokes and cracking wise with the other kids. Annie and I in class together, our hands popping up simultaneously whenever a teacher asked a question. My sister was the prettiest girl in the whole damn school, and I was her twin brother, and we were both smarter than anyone else around. We were The Gulliver Gang. My sister and I. We were twins.

But after her accident...

We thought it was the accident, you see.

We never once thought something might have happened to her in Sweden. Never once imagined anything had happened to her mind.

Even when she began losing interest in her classes, we blamed it on the accident. Now it was just my hand that popped up when a question was asked, my sister sitting unresponsive beside me. Or if, for example, a discussion was going on in class, where earlier Annie would have been a lively participant, she now sat silent and withdrawn. If a teacher asked, “Annie? Anything to contribute?” my sister would snap a surly “No!” or simply refuse to answer at all. Her concentration seemed to be fading. Sometimes, she didn’t seem to be there at all. I told her she should stop thinking about the accident all the time, focus her energy instead on the future. This was our senior year at Ambrose. We both had college to look forward to.

I wasn’t surprised when she started losing friends. At first, she just kept bad-mouthing the co-captains she insisted had deliberately broken her leg, but then she started accusing girls on the Ambrose team as well, her own team, suggesting that they’d also been part of the conspiracy somehow. Once, on my way to an English class, some girls from the team were whispering something as I approached, and all at once they stopped and turned away, and I figured they were talking about Annie, but I didn’t know how to defend her because I myself thought her accusations were completely wrong-headed. Another time, I saw some girls openly mocking her, pretending to limp down the hall and yelling, “They broke my leg, they broke my leg!” and I went over and said, “Cut it out, it wasn’t you who got hurt!”

Then my mother got a call after school one day, from the coach of the soccer team, who told her Annie was trying to work up a petition to get the two girls who’d broken her leg expelled from their school, and suggesting that Annie might want to schedule a talk with the psychiatrist at Ambrose. My mother took a fit. On the phone, she sounded the way she had that Thanksgiving morning when she was yelling at Grandma. “Are you suggesting there’s something wrong with my daughter?” she said. “You try having your leg broken, see what effect it has on you! Her father abandoned her when she was five, you might take that into consideration as well. My daughter’s an A-student, how dare you tell me she’s crazy? Oh, no? Then what did you just say?” My mother listened and then said, “Yes, I am listening, how about you listening to me for a change? My daughter’s not going to see any school psychiatrist! That’s the end of that!” she shouted, and hung up.

For the next several days, my mother kept telling me she was going to have both of us transferred out of that school, did they think they were the only private school in New York, how dared they say such things about her daughter? I finally convinced her that graduation was just around the corner. Annie had been accepted at Vassar, she’d soon be going off to college. She’d make new friends. The accident would become a forgotten incident in an otherwise memorable school career.

On a hot, steamy day in June of 1984, while the school band played Pomp and Circumstance, Annie and I were graduated from Ambrose Academy together with some fifty other seniors, all of us in black caps and gowns. My sister was still wearing the soft cast under her long black gown. None of her graduating team mates came over to congratulate her.

On September sixteenth that year, on a clear bright Sunday morning, we all drove out to Ridley Hills, New Jersey, to witness my brother Aaron’s marriage to the “Lack of Manners Clan,” as my sister had dubbed Augusta’s august tribe.

A week later, Annie flew off to New Delhi.

My mother swore she had not paid for the coach ticket on Air-India.

Neither she nor I could imagine where Annie had got the money for it.