What Has Vanished

Maura’s baby began vanishing on the fourth day of his life. Philip was born at 4:43 AM on a Wednesday, and on Friday, despite Maura’s and her husband Roger’s insistence that they were in no way equipped to care for the child (They weren’t, of course; no one is. They were equipped in the physical sense: a crib, pacifiers, a rocking chair, a whimsically-decorated walk-in closet that they converted into a surprisingly spacious nursery next to their bedroom. It was in the metaphysical sense that they felt suddenly ill-equipped.), they were sent home dispassionately by the hospital. 

On Friday night, neither Maura nor Roger slept. Maura was busy keeping watch over Philip, who was sleeping in a charming Moses basket next to their bed. Roger was busy keeping watch over Maura. Sheffield, their little black mutt, kept watch over Roger and began nosing him for breakfast at half past three in the morning. Philip slept in predictable sets of two hours. He woke, screamed, drank greedily from Maura’s cracked and aching breasts, and went back to sleep, often with his tiny mouth still attached to Maura. 

Saturday, Roger convinced Maura to let him take Philip for a couple of hours so that she could sleep. Maura insisted she wouldn’t fall asleep with the hot glare of the July sun beaming into their window, but Roger told her to just lie there for a few minutes and rest her body. Four hours later, she woke up. Disoriented, she ran downstairs. Roger was asleep on the couch with the monitor on his chest, rising and falling with his breath. 

“Where’s Philip?” Maura cried, sorry she’d ever trusted Roger with their son. 

Roger sat up with a start and immediately whisper-hissed, “He’s in his crib. He fell asleep in my arms so I took him up and laid him in the crib.”

“On his back?” Maura demanded. They’d taken a class. 

“Yes,” Roger said, summoning patience.

Maura turned and ran up the stairs, taking them by twos. When she entered the nursery, she heard Philip’s breath immediately, but she still took the few steps to his crib to look at him and ensure the breath sounds were his, that his chest was rising and falling. Satisfied, she left the nursery, but she kept the door cracked because she didn’t think Philip would want to be left alone after having been with her for the preceding nine months. 

#

Saturday evening, Maura fed Philip and laid him in his crib, since he’d slept longer there than anyplace else, and she hadn’t gotten around to cleaning the spit-up from inside the basket. She put him down carefully, made sure there were no stray cloths or pacifier leashes lying around, and left quietly. 

Downstairs, Roger had made some spaghetti. They ate together without speaking. It was still light outside and Sheffield wanted to go for a walk. 

“I’ll take him,” Roger said. 

“I got it.”

“Are you sure you feel up to it?”

“Yeah, it’ll be short. I’d like to get outside for a minute.”

“It’s hot out there.”

“The sun’s going down. The monitor’s on the counter. I’ll be right back.”

Sheffield was thrilled to be taken out, and Maura enjoyed the humid heat of the July evening. She hadn’t realized how tired she was, how focused on the simplest of human endeavors: to survive and raise young. Stepping outside, even for a few minutes, reminded her that there was more going on in the world aside from each squeak and breath and quick heartbeat of her child. She hadn’t realized how little she’d thought of anything else for the last four days. Even Sheffield, squatting to shit on the hot grass, looked astonished to recall that there was a whole dimension outside of the walls of their house.  

Maura had brought her phone on the walk. She pulled it out of her pocket and began reading the messages that had come through from friends and relatives asking, begging, demanding to see photographs of Philip. Roger had texted their families an hour or so after Philip was born, telling them that all was well and he weighed seven pounds six ounces, bald as a cue ball. Immediately, they’d asked for a picture, and so Roger had taken one and sent it. Since then, they’d taken dozens of photos of Philip—sleeping, crying, just lying there—but hadn’t thought to send any. She answered a few, then put her phone away to pick up after Sheffield. 

#

Roger was cleaning when she arrived home from the walk. He was good that way; he was a person who’d take care of what needed to be done, whatever it was. In this instance, there was a sink full of dirty dishes and a floor covered in dust and dog hair. Maura released Sheffield from his leash, walked over to Roger at the sink, kissed him, and went upstairs instinctively. The sun was farther down now; it was almost dark, and Maura was still preoccupied with the list of friends and family she needed to respond to. And her colleagues; they’d spent more time with Maura than almost anyone while she was pregnant. Amy and Josh deserved some pictures and an update. Maura wondered how they were faring covering for her. The door to Philip’s nursery was already ajar, and when Maura pushed it open, she saw an empty crib. She screamed. Roger told her later that her scream sounded inhuman. Not even animal, he said, but something else. Something otherworldly. In seconds Maura was over the crib, reaching into its emptiness. Her hands ran the length of the crib, her scream still filling the house and world. Suddenly, mass— Philip squirming on top of her hands, which were still open, palms facing down, frantically searching. He was wailing. Her wailing stopped. Roger was at the door bewildered. 

“What’s wrong? Oh my god! Is he okay? What happened?”

“He was gone! He wasn’t in the crib when I came in and then he just was in my hands.”

“What?”

“I opened the door and the crib was empty and I ran over here and I was running hands all over it and then he was on my hands.”

“Okay, here, let me take him. Take a deep breath. It’s all right. Everything is just fine. He’s right here. He’s fine. Are you okay?”

Maura was shaking and terrified, but in Roger’s voice, she heard a familiar tenor. He was comforting her, which was good and right and what she needed, but underneath the comfort was something sinister. 

“You don’t believe me.”

“I absolutely believe you.”

“You don’t!” 

Roger sounded just the way he did when Maura had come home one evening telling him she’d seen a beaver and her young waddling across their driveway. Their property abutted a small creek (mostly runoff) and the beaver mother had been leading two smaller beavers down the embankment. Maura tried to take a picture of them, but they’d been surprisingly quick. They were gone before she could get her phone out of her purse. When she told Roger about it, he laughed. Then, when he realized she was angry at him for not believing her, he’d sobered and treated her with the forced dignity one treats a young child searching the skies for Santa’s sleigh. 

#

The second time Philip vanished, Maura was at the grocery store. She hadn’t cooked the week leading up to his birth because she’d been too tired. In the two weeks since Philip’s birth, Maura and Roger had been getting by on meals brought by their friends and mothers. They were sick of pasta and casseroles. Roger wanted a steak. Maura wanted to go to the store for a change of scenery and, in a fit of feeling like a competent mother, she said she wanted to bring Philip with her, to see what it would be like to grocery shop with a baby. She figured he’d just sleep the whole time. She’d brought a car seat cover to keep germs and prying eyes from him, and she knew Thursdays were quiet at their neighborhood grocery. It was cloudy, so she knew the sun wouldn’t bother Philip’s eyes on the way to the store like it had on the way to his weight check the week prior. He’d screamed the whole way to the pediatrician, slept through the appointment, and screamed the whole way home. Now, though, he was quiet and dazed, looking around in silence. Maura turned into the grocery store, parked, and methodically gathered her items: phone, keys, list, diaper bag, carseat, baby. 

Having never been to the grocery store with an infant, Maura took several minutes in the parking lot, planning how to best get him out of the car and into the store. The car seat was heavy. Maura waddled gracelessly from the parking lot into the store, where she was greeted with a whoosh of icy cold air, bland pop music impossible to either like or dislike, and a lane full of carts. She heaved the car seat up into the basket of the cart. It took up nearly the entire basket, leaving a narrow perimeter into which Maura would have to wedge their groceries. Promptly, she took out the car seat cover and draped it over the handle. Philip’s fresh face was hidden from view. Satisfied, Maura pulled out her list and began shopping how she always did: produce, meat, bread, non-perishables, frozen, household goods. Her path around and through this store was well-worn in her mind. 

She began to think about going back to work for the first time since giving birth. She missed her clients and the challenge of trying to help them see things differently or solve a personal problem. After six years of working out of Dr. Fields’s basement, having clients park in the driveway and walk down and around to a private entrance, Maura and her two partners-—Amy Fields and Josh Silverman-—had recently bought a small office from a couple of dentists who were retiring. The dentists were pleased to sell the space to a group of three therapists, joking that since so many people had phobias and anxiety surrounding the dentist, the therapists could keep all the equipment and use it for “exposure therapy.” 

Maura hadn’t helped with the move, being so pregnant, and had only worked in the new space for a week before she’d started leaking amniotic fluid in the middle of a session and had to excuse herself. Her partners encouraged her to take more than twelve weeks. Amy was in her mid-fifties, had raised two sons, and had stopped work for six years when her children were young. Josh was in his mid-thirties, like Maura. Maura was pretty sure he was single, but he had never talked about his private life. In truth, Maura would love to take more than twelve weeks, but her husband’s work in construction was seasonal: the summers hot and busy, the winters cold and slow. Roger and Maura would need the income sooner rather than later. 

At the meat counter, Maura ordered two ribeyes from the young man behind the counter. She didn’t know which, but one of the men who worked back here was the son of a long-standing client. Celeste was a weepy, wispy woman who’d first come to Maura when she discovered her husband of twenty-two years had been cheating on her for much of that time. She was deeply distraught. After weeks of talking through it, Celeste uncovered the root of her distress: she didn’t want the marriage to end. Celeste could move past the deceit and betrayal. She wasn’t upset not by the process of forgiving her husband and moving past it, something she’d actually already done with some ease, but was upset by people’s expectations that she leave him, be bitter, be alone. Maura, though secretly repulsed by Celeste’s impulse for redemption over justice, guided her to an understanding of her marriage not as shameful or broken but as strong and resilient and of her emotions not as wrong but as complex and beautiful. 

As Maura took the steaks from the butcher, she was thinking of having a cold beer while Roger grilled. She was thinking of crumbling goat cheese on a salad of baby lettuces. She was thinking of having a big bowl of ice cream after dinner and of sitting on the couch with Roger, maybe getting her feet rubbed. She wasn’t thinking of Philip at all when her hand grazed over the carseat cover which caught on the modest solitaire diamond of her engagement ring, pulling it back for a moment. 

Maura felt herself go cold. Panic thrummed through her body in tingling waves, reaching her fingertips last. Philip was gone. For a moment, Maura felt sick at the thought that she left him out in the hot car. Just as she realized that couldn’t be the case, since his carseat was here in front of her, he reappeared, his breathing, measured, through his perfect nose, fast asleep with his little hands clutched together at his chest. Maura opened her mouth to wail or cry for help. She felt dizzy and weak. She needed to sit down, to leave the store, to pick up her baby and feel his weight against her. 

It must have been an odd sight for her client’s son to behold: one of three therapists in their small town running from the meat-counter. Leaving the cart of produce in the middle of the bread aisle. Removing her sleeping newborn baby from his carseat and holding him against her chest. Heaving the massive car seat and diaper bag into the crook of her other arm. Walking out of the store quickly without buying anything, the child not in any apparent distress. Having just ordered forty dollars’ worth of choice beef and leaving it out to spoil. 

Maura didn’t tell Roger about what happened in the grocery store. She knew he wouldn’t believe her anyway. She came up with a story that seemed plausible: Philip had started screaming at the butcher’s counter, before the butcher had even cut the steaks. Maura had told him to forget it, and had left right away, without even getting anything. 

“Oh no! I guess Philip hates grocery shopping as much as I do. I’ll run out and grab everything. No problem.”

“No, don’t do that!” Maura couldn’t bear to have Roger see the precise elements of their list sitting in an abandoned cart. The meat would still be cool. And she couldn’t bear to have him go back and order the ribeyes again from the man. He would know. “Let’s just order a pizza.” 

#

Early the next morning, after Philip’s dawn feeding, Maura told Roger she was going to slip out for a walk before it got too hot. She took her phone and texted Amy, her colleague: are you up for your walk yet? 

Amy texted back quickly, as she always did. Almost to the lake. Everything ok? 

Maura fished around for something to say. She’d planned to be straightforward, but now that seemed insane: No actually everything is not ok. My son keeps disappearing when I’m not looking and then reappearing immediately. My husband doesn’t believe me. Also I feel like I am dead but walking around. Also it hurts to sit. Obviously she couldn’t say that. She settled for a thinly-veiled explanation for her text. Yeah everything is great just had a client reach out about a semi-emergent matter. Think she’s got PPD? Psychosis maybe?? Wondering who to send her to. 

Amy : Give her Josh’s number. I’m swamped. Glad all is well! Enjoy every moment! Send pics today xoxo

#

Maura waited until Roger had left for a jobsite for a few hours to call Josh. She was going to call his cell, but she decided on second thought that if she called his office phone, he’d be more apt to take her seriously. She badly wanted to text, but every time she typed out a message, on the reread, it looked like the ramblings of someone who has truly lost it. She needed to be able to gauge his reaction in real time and adjust her explanation and question accordingly. On the second ring, he picked up. 

“Josh Silverman.” He should try to sound friendlier, she thought. Then again, between his own clients and half of Maura’s he was probably at capacity. The next desperate new patient to call was going to be referred to the big group in the city, almost an hour away. 

“Josh, hi. It’s Maura.”

#

The next time Philip vanished, Josh was at Maura’s house. Roger was at work. Maura, in an attempt to pay Josh back for taking a week’s worth of lunch breaks at her house, was making BLTs on homemade bread with homegrown tomatoes. Philip was in his swing, entranced by the stars that dangled above his head from the bar. Josh was sitting at Maura’s island, drinking an iced tea, filling her in on all of her clients. She’d asked. It was really the only thing they had in common, and so it was easy and fruitful conversation. The truth was, though, Maura felt she’d underestimated Josh. For one thing, he believed her. Almost right away, he believed the reality of what she told him on the phone that day weeks ago. Maura could tell he wasn’t just blowing smoke up her ass. And for another thing, he was making breakthroughs with some of her clients who’d been stuck for months. 

Maura turned around to flip the bacon, considering Josh’s assessment of one of her teenage patients who wanted to emancipate himself. 

“It’s just a cry for attention,” Maura said confidently. “He wants to scare his mother into giving him more freedom so she doesn’t lose him completely.” 

“I don’t know,” Josh answered. “It seems to me that his mother is giving him fewer and fewer freedoms as he gets older, rather than the other way around. He says he used to play outside in their cul-de-sac for hours on summer nights without once checking in with her. Now, if he isn’t home from school by 3:10, he’s getting frantic texts. She won’t let him go to the beach with his friends. She doesn’t let him drive alone at night. She reads all his text messages, makes him leave his bedroom door open at night, stays up until he goes to sleep every night and checks him before going to sleep herself. I almost think he has the right idea.”

“Well,” Maura said, turning around. Behind Josh sat the empty swing. Just as Maura screamed for Josh to turn around and look for god’s sake, Philip reappeared. “It just happened I swear to god he was just gone and then as soon as I said something, he’s back. I swear I swear. It’s real and it just happened and you fucking missed it.”

“I’m sorry. I believe you. I’m sorry.”

“What do I do?” Maura ran over to pick Philip up. The bacon was burning. 

“When it happens, are you always looking away?”

“Yeah, I mean I only see him come back, not leave.”

Josh took Philip from Maura and held him comfortably, like someone who’d done it before. “And when you see he’s gone, what’s your first reaction?”

“What the hell, Josh, I’m not your patient. I feel horror. I feel fucking awful. I feel devastated.” 

Josh held Philip up in front of him so he could see his face. He smiled warmly and then held him against his chest and rubbed his back. Philip burped and settled. “After that though. How do you feel after you feel horror?”

Maura considered this. She considered her life. Her easy, fulfilling, happy life. She had had an easy childhood and a happy adolescence. She’d worked hard in school and become a therapist, like she always wanted. She’d met a wonderful man in her late twenties. They’d married, they’d gotten a dog like she always wanted. They’d had a baby, fulfilling a wish of hers so profound she’d dared not name it when she was younger. Her deepest, oldest longing, so old it was inherited: to be a mother. When she thought of her child she swelled with joy and love and gratitude. When she didn’t think of him for even one moment, he disappeared. And she felt— 

“Relieved.”

Saying the word, Maura felt her shoulders relax away from her ears. Using a serrated knife with a worn wooden handle she sliced the sourdough, then the tomato. Bacon lay cooling on a greasy paper towel; lettuce dripped in the colander. 

Behind her, she could hear the sputtering, haphazard sounds her newborn made and the sure way Josh responded to him. He would vanish again in the coming months and years, usually only briefly but once for just under six hours. Maura would never quite adjust, neither to the disappearances nor to the constant looming sense of dread that came with raising Philip, but she would learn to live with it. 

Now though, she hoped Josh would hold Philip long enough for her to finish her sandwich, which she knew would be delicious, but then she knew she’d have to take him back, have to tend to him — while she had him. That would be a relief, too, in its own way.

###

Released: April 15th, 2022