Vanishing Act - Part 2

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She gazed sadly at me for several moments like she expected me to speak. Once she knew I would not, she continued:

“The people in this business are typically frauds looking for an easy buck or fools who think they can hear the dead. But under my roof there is no make believe, no tricks, no hallucinations of mine or anyone else’s fancy.

“Those who expect a bit of fun usually get more than they bargain for. Most of the people who pay for my services have never had an occult experience in their lives. On occasion I’ll have a customer who is actively haunted by the dead or bearing a curse passed from one generation to the next.

“But you ….” she said with a puzzled expression and then left the words hanging unspoken.

“But me,” I replied.

“But you,” she said with a sigh, “are veiled. You did not ask to come and yet here you are with a dragon doll in your purse.”

“Dragon … doll?”

“A mandragora root.” She smiled when I winced with surprise. “It’s not the first time someone has brought one to a séance of mine, but the doll you carry is very different from those others. I feel it in my bones. They were merely painted roots. But yours ….”

I gripped my purse defensively as tears began to well in my eyes, the desire to stand up and run from the room almost overpowering.

“I can see the pain etched in your features, but I cannot see you. Something’s hiding you. Something very powerful.”

I clutched the purse tightly and felt it lurch. Not now, I thought desperately.

She raised her eyebrows and whispered, “Playing with fire, are we?”

Blinking in alarm, I did not reply.

“Do you know what the Harrowing is?”

I answered with a wet-eyed stare.

“The great emptying. Fits of vomiting of such intensity and duration that eventually you will long for the release of death. The Harrowing is the dark night of the soul – life stripped of artifice and emptied of the refuse that we unwittingly label meaning.

Nietzsche said, ‘That which does not kill me makes me stronger.’ But his wits did not survive the Harrowing … men’s wits rarely do. He certainly wouldn’t,” she said with a rude jerk of her thumb.

“But I’m guessing you already know that. A doll with the kind of power that yours just demonstrated would have exacted a price.”

She asked, “Would you like to show it to me, dear?” the music in her voice tugging at my heart before my purse lurched even harder than before.

I growled “Mine,” through gritted teeth.

“You shouldn’t play with things you don’t understand.”

I had already lived through my own emptying after reading my father’s letters, my heart afterwards like a fire that would not light for want of a spark. I ate so little that my mom finally admitted me to the hospital.

They ended up drugging me to keep me from pulling my feeding tube out. She thought I was anorexic, but I was just terribly sad. Once I returned home after the treatment I did not laugh for a very long time. I never truly recovered. A part of me is as lost as the love my father might have given me and I think always will be.

People say it’s not the child’s fault when mommy and daddy stop loving each other. But I know better. I read his letters. My father made it clear to my mother from the beginning that kids were out of the question.

In the last one he reminded her of the many times he had warned her to be careful. ‘I might have stayed for a boy,’ he wrote, ‘but for a daughter? That was an insufferable abuse of my trust.’

Although she never said it aloud, I know my mom resented me as well. I heard it daily in the weariness in her voice and could see the bitterness hiding beneath her emotionless expression. If I had been a boy, my father might have stayed. He might have loved us both.

The only good things that ever happened in my life are Hey Kat and Orfy. Mom didn’t care for the former. “Imaginary friends are for the weak-minded, we’re better than that,” she often scolded.

But Hey Kat is not imaginary. She is as real as any person I have ever known. It does not matter to me that no one could see or hear her except for me.

Mom assumed that I created Hey Kat for lack of friends. Acting on that assumption she arranged a playdate with Orfy, the son of a fellow assembly worker at the Federal Cartridge Company.

Orfy never gave me a hard time about Hey Kat. Since his mother left when he was four, he understood me like no one else I have ever known. Soon we were inseparable, both of us loners shaped by abandonment and want.

As we got older, my feelings for Orfy turned from friendship to desire. But it was Lila who caught his eye and enslaved his heart. After that she was all he ever talked about. Every hurt she inflicted, every slight, every reminder of her advantages and his deficits he shared with me. Some tearfully, and others in red hot anger.

How I longed to tell him that he didn’t need her, that I fully accepted and loved him. But he desired her with the same intensity and feeling that I desired him. That kind of fierce longing, at least, I understand.