Free Vanishing and Other Stories by Deborah Willis

his car on the flattened grass, walked in without knocking, looked out from those windows. One of those windows is yours. One of those rooms has a bed, a lamp, a bookshelf, whatever else you keep. In the garden I notice a boy, twenty at the oldest, and stop walking. He hasn’t seen me, but I’m close enough to watch him pop green beans off their stalks and lay them in a flat basket. He wears a beat-up leather cowboy hat and takes bites from some of the beans, throws others over his shoulder. I can’t distinguish much of his features except for dark hair that falls over his eyes in a wavy, undecided way. His arms are muscular but too long and his jeans don’t fit right along his legs: too tight at the ankles but nearly slipping off his hip bones.
    â€œShe could be here. Behind those curtains.” April is beside me, her chin on my shoulder. She left the car running, her door open. “That’s probably her roommate. Get back in the car. I shouldn’t have brought you here.”
    The boy finishes picking, then leaves the garden through a wire gate and heads toward the house. Even from this distance, I hear the clump of his boots on the hollow porch, the creak of the screen door as he passes inside.
    â€œHello? Mimi?” April whispers. “I’m agreeing with you. This was a bad idea.”
    â€œI want to see her.” I hand April the bottle. For the first time, I feel as though I can picture you: the green pants on the line would fit a woman with narrow hips, though the shirt proves broader shoulders, likely freckled with sun. And I picture your hairthe same rust shade as the house, imagine you pedalling down your driveway on the old bicycle that rests against the porch. Your hair flies behind you in a tangle of auburn. Is that how Peter first saw you, on your bicycle? Muscular calves, bare feet. I can picture it.
    Then I feel fur rub my sandalled foot: a small white cat scratches at my toes, and I bend to pet its head. He rubs his wet nose into my outstretched hand. “Hey? Hey, who are you?” These days I feel a tipsy affection for anyone who touches me, no matter how accidental. “Look at you, mister. Look at you.”
    April presses the lukewarm wine bottle to my shoulder and passes it to me. “Apparently she’s a cat person.”
    When I look up, I notice an entire litter. They idle under trees, sleek across the fence, pounce half hidden through grass. Some are white like the one who now obsessively licks the hairs of my arm, but there are a couple of golden tabbies, some greys. Feral, but friendly enough. As they walk, the movement of their bones shows under their coats. Eyes depthless and crystal, amber or sap green.
    â€œGive me a minute.” I scoop up the small white cat and walk to the chicken-wired garden. Your garden is nothing like April’s. Hers is cluttered with bursts of showy, non-indigenous colour: irises, rhododendrons. Her orchids have won prizes. Your garden is muted greens: peas, beans, herbs, unripe tomatoes, a corner of strawberry plants that shoot out slim legs. I’ve never had a garden, though Peter and I do keep and name potted plants. Next to these neat rows I feel off balance, useless. I turn back to April and throw the wine bottle behind me, over the deer-proof fence and into the garden. An arc of Shiraz sputters through the air. “Okay. Fuck it. Let’s go.”
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    AS I SAID BEFORE , you are not the first. There was that Heather girl: Irish, an exchange student. Peter came home from work one evening and cried into my lap until my black pants were soaked through. He repeated over and over the banal words the girl spoke. She had said, “I admire you,” then unbuttoned her coarse blue sweater in his office. I stroked his back and made him tell me everything: how she wore her hair, what she smelled like, the angle of her cheekbones, the shape of her chin and nose. It was how I forgave him.
    Months