The Art of Disappearing Ivy Pochoda (electronic book reader .TXT) 📖

Then Sandra spoke up. “Aren’t you the lucky one to tame a magician. Never seen anyone hold on to her man as well as you did. Had all the Vegas ladies in knots. He’s a keeper, all right. Just don’t let him wander off. Might transform into I-don’t-know-what and never come back.” A deep sigh resounded from a coral pink cotton-spandex blend. “Now wouldn’t that be a shame.”

“Loving water,” Max’s voice whispered from my feet, where I had placed the paisley velvet bolt, “doesn’t mean you need to ignore everything else. Maybe I loved water a little too much,” he sighed. “I didn’t know what else to do. It claimed me first.” I reached back into the cabinet and withdrew six more bolts in variegated blues.

“Snow,” my mother’s voice cried from a white sateen. “Don’t forget where you come from. It’s dangerous to forget where you come from. Look at the mess you got yourself into in the desert. You might as well spend your life on drugs as spend time in a desert. All that heat melted your brain.” The white sateen clicked its tongue. “Might as well get hooked on drugs.”

I gathered the bolts in my arms, listening to the voices from my past, and some I thought were calling to me from my future. But none of the fabrics spoke in Toby’s sawdust circus voice. I placed the fabric around the drafting table and wondered what was going to happen next. The voices kept talking, their words overlapping, swirling together. And finally, when I feared their stories and explanations would deafen me or drive me mad, I picked up my scissors.

I’ve been here and there in my life with fabrics, but they had never spoken to me so clearly and never had they spoken with familiar voices. My fingers were thrumming. The velvet paisley fabric was in my hand. And then I heard my brother’s voice once more as the paisleys took the shape of waves, crashing over one another, each one dissolving inside the next. They became the surf and the undertow. They were the currents and the tides. Max ducked and swam inside them. He dived and crested on the worktable. He submerged for minutes before coming up for air. The paisleys became rivers, then my family’s river. They became creek beds and estuaries. They transformed into harbors. And in all of these, I saw Max swimming, riding over the rounded crests of the paisleys, diving down into their valleys, and then ascending to their pointed tips. Several times, I thought that I’d lost him in the whirls and whirlpools of the pattern. But he always resurfaced, bobbing up and down on another shape. And then in the middle of the clearest blue of the pattern, Max waved good-bye, pointed deep into the fabric, and disappeared.

While I had been watching my brother, I had been cutting the blue fabrics, reducing them to squares and rectangles of various sizes. I found a needle, threaded it, and without regard for pattern or style, began to sew. My hands went their own way. The needle struck its own rhythm as it wove in and out of the fabric.

I have no idea how long I sewed, but soon I had created an underwater patchwork world. I shook off my thimble and dropped the needle. I held the quilt to the light and stared at the motionless water created and trapped by my hands. The paisley print that spoke with Max’s voice flowed in and out of a host of different blues and greens. Among these was a chintz printed with algaelike flowers and a brocade with twisting plants that could be mistaken for seaweed. In addition to the familiar waters of my youth—the Delaware River and all the pools I had never dared to swim in—I found dozens of bodies of water that I hadn’t ever known or imagined.

I peered closely at this quilt and imagined joining Max’s water to the fabrics from my last hotel job. I reached under the drafting table and withdrew several red bolts. Some of them whispered with Eva’s faraway voice; others simply sounded like the wind-whipped sand. Soon these were cut and ready to be joined to the oceanic blues. First, the desert of Tonopah and Intersection where I had met the magician and watched him work his imperfect magic. This was the desert where we had been blown together along with the sand and tumbleweed. These patches were the dirty red of distant mesas and sacred kivas. They were red with the burn of the relentless sun and the blood of the gum-snapping girl. The fabrics were scratchy and rough—coarse linens, poor felts, even frieze. While I had been watching the colors and the textures of the desert, she appeared—the yellow-and-red-polka-dotted Greta. I looked down at my hands. I could feel the familiar depressions from the scissors loops on my thumb and middle finger. My fingers didn’t stop. A new desert began to emerge with all the colors of Las Vegas. Boisterous sequins, relentless polyvinyls, plush terry velours exploded from my scissors. My needle, threaded with fire-enginered thread, began to join these newcomers to the scratchy fabrics of the first desert. I strip-pieced the pattern that the wind etched into the sand. The desert that I was piecing together hummed with the voices of the fabrics I was using. Finally, my hands shook off the thimble and dropped the needle. I looked up. Night had fallen. The river had been claimed by the dark. The only light was a distant glow from the villa.

I left the table and ran toward the house, passing the ghost rabbit enclosures. I found Olivia sprawled on a sea of shearling in the main hall in front of a roaring fire.

I grabbed her hand. “You have to come.”

She staggered after me. I pulled her through the woods, her scarf catching on branches and brambles as we went. We arrived at the studio, breathless.

“What?” Olivia asked,