Free Vanishing and Other Stories by Deborah Willis Page A

later, I met her at a faculty and grad student party. I shook her hand. She was a quiet girl, with a thick body and still eyes. I’ve tried to imagine how it felt to be her, the girl, or to be you for that matter, the “other woman.” Of course, as Peter would point out, you can only be defined in relation to “the woman.” Without me, you disappear.
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    I MET APRIL the day after Peter and I unpacked our suitcases. She was to be our neighbour. Her acre is next to the stout brown house Peter had arranged to rent for four months,
a place where we can get some quiet
, he called it. He hadn’t bargained on the shaky bleats of April’s goats, her chickens’ chatter, or the lowing of her Jersey, Marilyn. April arrived on our doorstep with a plastic bucket of brown and blue eggs and a zucchini as long as my forearm, though not as skinny. She never goes anywhere without gifts. We have a fridge full of her eggs, their shells like pastel chalk.
    I was opening and closing cupboards in the kitchen, to see what plates and pots we’d been provided with, while Peter flipped through the island’s weekly fifteen-page newspaper. He read the best headlines aloud to me from our screened deck. “‘Garage Sale Draws 200.’” He smoked a cigarette, an occasional habit we both refuse to give up. “Two hundred. Just imagine that.”
    â€œGracious.”
    Then April, in neon pink flip-flops, slapped her way up our porch steps and stood in front of the screen door. “Hello! Welcome wagon!”
    I came out of the kitchen in leggings, one of Peter’s collared shirts, bare feet. Peter stared at her but didn’t move to the door, didn’t say a word.
    â€œHave you been to Vesuvius Beach yet?” April held up her hand, her stretched and faded bathing suit hooked on her thumb. Purple and white flowers. “Warmest on the island!” She pushed open our screen door, stepped onto the deck, and handed me the eggs. She wore a white dress of eyelet lace and a sheer magenta shawl. She is the kind of big woman who believes she can wear anything, and so, miraculously, she can.
    I said, “These eggs are blue,” and ten minutes later I was seated on the duct-taped upholstery of her car (which we would later name Lemon). As we left Peter behind in the brown house, I remembered to introduce myself: “I’m Mimi. Who are you?”
    Now she arrives nearly every morning with cappuccinos she makes herself, and some afternoons we paint together, it doesn’t matter what: Fulford’s streets, the view from Mount Erskine, or Marilyn, who stands dull and quiet for hours behind April’s violet bungalow. For me, a studio painter, this is not the kind of work I do. But for April, art is a social, drunken, unserious business. Shegoes to the mainland to buy red-sable brushes, scrubs them lovingly with walnut oil, but hardly knows how to use them. When she can scrape together the money, she buys primed canvas like paper, wastes it on first attempts.
    April and I spent that first afternoon at Vesuvius Beach. It was May, not warm enough to swim, but we did anyway. She brought a six-pack of frothy, malty beer I’d never heard of, and we plotted to seduce the young sons of tourists once July came. April manages to have a sex life, though we don’t discuss it much. And she doesn’t know, for example, that Peter and I only make love in the middle of the night, when the room is dark. I wake to his fingers sliding down my arms, then the sex is hard. We grip each other like strangers, hot breath on our faces. Then we fall asleep, my cheek pressed to his wet, bony chest. By morning he’s gone, reading the paper or already in the kitchen with April, drinking a cappuccino.
    After our trip to Vesuvius Beach, I came home to Peter, who was still on the deck. I rushed up the steps. “We’re having dinner at April’s.”
    â€œSo you like it