Now You See Her by Joy Fielding

it’s supposed to freeze you from the waist down, except they gave me too much and it froze me right up to my chest, and it felt as if I couldn’t breathe, and I was crying, telling them I couldn’t breathe, but the doctors insisted I was breathing justfine, even though it felt like I was dying. Can you understand? I thought I was dying. And I was so scared. I was so scared,” she repeated, her shoulders shaking with the ferocity of her sobs.
    And then she suddenly dropped to the floor, curled into a tight fetal ball, and fell fast asleep.
    She slept for the rest of the day, and the next morning she was gone.
    “Where’s Mom?” Marcy remembered asking when she came downstairs for breakfast.
    Judith shrugged, cutting the omelet their father had made her into tiny pieces, then lifting a forkful of the eggs to her mouth and returning it to her plate untouched. “Away.”
    “Where’d she go?”
    “Where she usually goes,” Judith replied.
    Which meant nobody knew. Periodically, their mother simply disappeared. Usually for a period of several weeks. Sometimes less, occasionally more. Nobody ever knew where she went. Their father had stopped trying to find her after the first few times, stopped reporting her disappearances to the police, stopped hiring detectives to find her, stopped searching through homeless shelters and checking the dirty and raggedly dressed bodies asleep on downtown sewer grates. Once, when Marcy was in her teens and out with a group of friends from school, she thought she saw her mother rifling through a garbage bin outside a store window, but she turned away before she could be sure and quickly ushered her friends to another location.
    Her father had tried to explain, using the accepted parlance of the day. “Your mother is manic-depressive. There’s nothing to worry about. She’s not going to die. She’s not dangerous. She just gets very excited and then she gets very depressed. But as long as she takes her medication, she’ll be able to function just fine.”
    Except she hated her medication. It made her feel as if she were, in her words, “trying to do the butterfly stroke in a vat of molasses.” And so she’d stop taking it. And then the cycle would begin again: the wild mood swings, the talking too fast and interrupting too much, the unrelenting intensity that accompanied even the most mundane of acts, the hysterical fits of laughter, the terrifying crying jags, the sudden falling asleep, the eventual disappearing act.
    It didn’t take Marcy long to learn the signs. She got very good at predicting when her mother was about to take off. “It’s happening again,” she’d say to Judith. Invariably she was right.
    Except once.
    “Okay, enough of that,” Marcy said, pushing herself out of her too-soft bed and flipping on the overhead light. She should have brought a book with her, she thought. Who goes on holiday and doesn’t take a book? Something—anything—to keep her mind occupied, to keep the ghosts of the past at bay. She’d buy one as soon as the stores opened. Along with a new cell phone, she decided, walking to the window and staring through the dusty lace curtains at the closed blinds of the room across the way. She was still standing there, still staring, when the night sky began to brighten and the bells of St. Anne’s Shandon Church announced the start of a new day.
    AS SOON AS the stores opened, Marcy purchased a new cell phone and called Liam.
    “Did I wake you?” she asked, hearing the sleep still clinging to his voice. What was the matter with her? Why had she called him so early? Why had she called him at all, for God’s sake? He’d said to check in periodically, not first thing the next morning. So what was she doing? Just because he’d sat withher for the better part of twenty minutes yesterday afternoon didn’t mean he was truly interested in her problems. A natural flirt, he’d only been humoring her with his attention. He didn’t really care about