The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

by Maggie O'Farrell

It is always the meaningless tasks that endure: the washing, the cooking, the clearing, the cleaning. Never anything majestic or significant, just the tiny rituals that hold together the seams of human life.

This girl is remarkable to her. She is a marvel. From all her family—her and Kitty and Hugo and all the other babies and her parents—from all of them, there is only this girl. She is the only one left. They have all narrowed down to this black-haired girl sitting on the sand, who has no idea that her hands and her eyes and the tilt of her head and the fall of her hair belong to Esme’s mother. We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.

The house was deathly quiet without her. Hours could pass without a single sound. In an odd way, we no longer seemed like a family, just a collection of people living in different rooms.

She turns to the girl standing next to her and this girl is so like Esme’s mother, so very like, that it could be her—but her in strange, layered clothes and with her hair cropped and cut in an asymmetric slant across the forehead, so unlike how her mother’s would ever have been, it makes her almost laugh to think it. And she sees that the girl is hers, too. What a thought. What a thing. She wants to take the girl’s hand, to touch that flesh which is her flesh. She wants to hold on to her, fast, in case she might float off and up into the clouds, like a kite or a balloon. But she doesn’t. Instead she takes two steps to a chair and sits down, the photograph on her knee.