Anna disappeared slowly and then all at once. A gradual slipping away, the sort of which that when her neighbors and friends finally noticed, they couldn’t say exactly when they had last seen her.
It had started with her divorce from Smith — that was his honest-to-god first name, a sort of joke from his perpetually distant father. Everyone agreed that the divorce had come out of nowhere, far-flung and unexpected, but nevertheless not all that surprising. Things were good, it seemed, until they weren’t, and one day Anna changed the name on her nameplate, admitted in a few sparse sentences that she and Smith were going their separate ways, and that she’d taken custody of the cat and he the dog, and that was that. Not another word was said of the matter. Her coworkers had murmured that perhaps it was all for the best, that Smith had been something of an odd duck — you had to be when you had two last names — and that maybe Anna would be a little less odd herself without absorbing some of his residual traits. But, then again, Anna had never really fit in. Conversations hung limp around her. Half-invested, she’d murmur a sentence or two and offer a half smile. The conversations stalled and spluttered until Anna or the other issued a curt nod and another half smile, headed off the other way.
From then on, Anna turned on her computer, poured a cup of tea, and set quietly about the rest of her day. And, for the most part, her coworkers were okay with that. It was easier that way, easier to let Anna do her own thing without the strangeness in between.
Pretty soon, they stopped seeing her in the break room even. They used to see her when she made tea. Loose leaf green tea. She used to joke that if management ever searched her desk they’d fire her for having some sort of illicit substance. Now she just made it at her desk, seemingly getting the water before anyone else had even ventured to the kitchen. Before anyone else was even at work, perhaps, because who could say? It was easy not to see Anna at all.
The neighbors noticed more slowly. Smith took his things away, one carload at a time, often at night, so they didn’t notice his dissolving himself from the house. The curtains were drawn, the porch light off. The house seemed to recede from the street, the way some do until they almost fade off into the background. Anna left early and came back late and avoided crossing paths with her neighbors deftly and almost entirely. The McIntosh boy came over with a stack of misdelivered mail and knocked. Waited. Anna’s car was in the driveway, but the house was quiet. The cat watched from the window.
It was no wonder really that it took the neighbors so long to notice. The yard was kept neat and trim, the flowers watered so that the petunias stayed a vibrant pink all summer long. The spiderwebs were kept at bay and the windows were clean. There wasn’t any reason to think that maybe anything was amiss with Anna at all. In fact, when asked about it sometime later, Mr. and Mrs. McIntosh couldn’t really say much at all about any of it except that she had a vague sort of hair color, ashy, perhaps blonde or maybe brown, and that her name was maybe Mrs. Smith, but frankly they’d always been confused on that account.
Anna was executing her disappearance deftly. Effortlessly really. A lesser person with half her patience would have done a sloppy job of it. A lesser person would have made sure that her disappearance was flounced about, the talk of the town. But not Anna. Anna wanted to make sure that her disappearance was of the simple sort, irrevocable once noticed.
Make no doubt about it, Anna’s disappearance, her withdrawal from the world, really, was intentional. Smith might have been the impetus, the catalyst, but in truth he was just a bystander who happened to get caught up in it all. Anna couldn’t do it while Smith was around, with his insistence on adhering to their daily routines. Smith was rigid in his approach to life. There was one way of doing it, and it boiled down to structure. A strict daily schedule with no deviations, a weekly habit of chores, monthly social appearances. It wasn’t enough to do these quietly. Smith advertised it, boasted about his perfect methodology. Anna’s penchant for being alone, for doing things when and how she pleased did not fit Smith’s standards.
They’d each found in each other the only thing they couldn’t stand, and in the end it took one nameless act of transgression for them to dissolve it altogether, which is what they did, quietly on both accounts.
And without Smith and his insistence on trips out and appearances made, Anna was free to do as she always wished, to quietly fade away.
It was easy to do after Smith had left, and after her gradual withdrawal from work and the neighborhood. There wasn’t much else left. In an age when most people’s friends were collected neatly online, it was a simple matter to delete her accounts. She ordered her groceries, her clothes, her books. Stopped going out, easier done than said.
It wasn’t long at all until the only person who knew anything at all about Anna was the mailman. And he wasn’t the sort to stop to chat.