A note, a hole, betrayal

I’ve always wondered about the note. I can still see the white paper, folded four times to fit into my father’s shirt pocket. I can see the creases, imagine the roughness of the fibres at the folds. I could see it resting on my parents’ dresser, one corner sticking up, beside cufflinks and Kleenex and powder, reflected in the mirror behind it.
The note wasn’t addressed to me, but I wondered. Then it vanished.
Everything was vanishing.
My brother had already vanished.The police came after midnight, two of them to carry the news, offering official sympathy in awkward French-accented English, one needing a shave, crumbs still nesting on his dark blue jacket front.
I woke to my father’s hesitant knock on the bedroom door. The light from the hall was behind him; his face was hidden in darkness. He was calm, his voice even, his hair slightly mussed.
I drove him to the hospital, along roads almost deserted, glad when cars came towards us and I could hold my eyes half shut against the headlights. I found myself humming, softly, and caught myself. In emergency the smell of soap and machinery and fear touched the back of my throat, and I coughed. A woman holding a child frowned at me. My father gave his name. The nurse behind the desk, black circles under her eyes, something chalky in the corner of her mouth, offered a look of sympathy, but with it a question.
My father went through swinging doors. I waited, listening to the hum of the fluorescent lights, and the moans of a man from somewhere down the hall. I felt cold, and realized I had no shirt on under my jacket. We went home.
The vanishing kept happening. I drove again, the next morning, to the Palais de Justice, and the trip vanished as I made it. I waited in the car, illegally parked, while my father went in and did what the law required.
The sun hurt, splintering off the dusty, greasy windows of a restaurant across the street. Looking up, I tried to see where three men had escaped from the jail on the top floors, climbing down an improbable string of prison bedsheets. The radio told me about traffic on the bridges. I closed my eyes, turned off the radio, and wondered what the note said.
More vanishing. My parents vanish, to make arrangements, then again, alone for a service. I drive Jenn to school while they are gone.
There’s a grave somewhere. There’s a small newspaper story, which someone rips out - I don’t know who, because it’s there, then it’s not there, just the space with other stories around. Lay the page flat, and the type behind shows through the hole, and it disappears.
We sit and watch TV four days later, and the air is brittle, so we breathe carefully, and speak rarely, anxious to avoid a jagged breath. The house seems to have dried, so when I go to get a drink I walk carefully on the dark brown carpet, fearful the floorboards and joists underneath will shriek if steps are too hard, or too fast. There is something wrong with the drink, a dry, metallic taste.
The last thing to vanish is the empty space and the silence.
At first, I walk around the empty space. It claims a whole bedroom, a space at the table. We walk carefully. My father is almost pulled in once - I can see him stumble as he nears the space, but he catches himself and is out the door.
We fill the space. A chair goes missing. I walk closer to the space, returning to straight lines.
The silence takes longer to vanish.It fills the room even when radios are playing, and television is laughing.
But we wait it out, then we push back, talking about errands and neighbours and the weather until the silence has vanished too. We pepper the silence with questions.
“Did you have a good day?” “Have you done your homework?”
“Do you think it will rain?” “What do you want in your lunch?”
“Do you need anything at the store?”
And with practical talk we drown out the questions in our heads. No space; no silence; no note.
Except the note hasn’t really vanished. It’s gone, I know. But at least one night a week, I have a dream where I can see it has not disappeared, it’s stuck to my dark cork bulletin board. It is, beside a quote from Thomas Hardy, about the coming universal urge not live.
But I never get up to see the note. I know there will be another dream.