He's Gone (10 page)

“It’s hard to stay calm,” I say. “This is just so awful.”

“Go home. Let us know if you hear anything.”

I get in my car. My hands are shaking. All of me is shaking so badly. The worst thing is, I can feel that detective watching me.

I don’t go home after all. I’m right there next to BetterWorks, and so I drive into their lot and park in Ian’s spot. Abby’s right, we should be doing something, only I don’t know what. I can’t wait for the phone to ring anymore, that’s for sure.

I want to go in. I want to talk to everyone there to see if they know anything. I want to search through Ian’s office, look at his papers, read the files on his computer. I want to find some telltale message or receipt. I wonder if Detective Vince Jackson is still around, eyeing my every move.

I’ve seen Ian come out of that building so many times. We always met there in those early days, holing up in his office after hours, breathing each other in and leaping apart when the cleaning woman came to dump the garbage. Ah. But we’ve spent so much time there in our ordinary life, too, during our not-quite-three years of marriage, after our scandalous days were over. When we lived at my old house, I’d drive over the bridge and meet Ian here after work so we could walk to Costa’s for dinner, and after we moved to the houseboat last year, I came even more often. He would meet me in the lobby, or I’d wait by my car until he appeared with his laptop bag slung over his shoulder, his collar undone, and a huge smile on his face. We’d kiss. I’d smell that cologne of his. I love that smell. That smell is him to me.

Fingertips tap on my car window. Oh, God, no! Shit, shit, shit! I picture Detective Vince Jackson’s big, guarded face again, staring in at me. It’s not a crime, is it, to long for Ian? To be there, where he’s most likely to show up? He didn’t just
disappear
. He’s
somewhere
.

But it isn’t Detective Vince Jackson who’s tapping at my car window. It’s Nathan Benjamin.

“Dani?” His voice is muffled through the glass. His two first names make him seem friendly, as I’ve said, but so does his great
hair—longish loose curls—and his warm eyes. He has nice-person hands, too. They aren’t lean and manicured; they’re guy hands, with uneven nails. Even though Nathan is very good looking, he is somehow regular and approachable. He still wears a wristwatch, the kind with the sun and moon rotating in small dials.

I roll down my window. I put my hand to my heart. “You scared me.”

“I’m so sorry. That’s the last thing you need right now.”

“This is horrific,” I say.

“The police were here a minute ago. A detective. He was asking questions.”

“I saw him. Did you hear what you just said? ‘The police were here.’ This isn’t real.”

“Do you want to come in?” he asks. “Come sit in my office? I can get you something to eat? Drink? Some company? Do you just want to be nearby?”

“I think I’ll get going.” The idea of playing detective is rapidly losing its appeal. I’m not sure I can face those people in there.

“All right.” He sets his hand on the ledge of the window. He pats it.

“We’ll talk,” I say.

“We’ll talk,” he agrees.

I leave him standing there in the empty spot next to Ian’s parking place. Two nights ago, right there on that lawn, it was spring, and there was music, and there were waiters passing drinks.

Later, it’s like a wake at my house. On a normal weekday, Ian would be arriving home any minute. I’d have cleared my work crap from the kitchen table and set it for two as dinner cooked.
A pasta dish, stir-fry. I’d light a candle for us, and I’d put on makeup. But instead of Ian and me eating dinner and watching some show we liked, people are arriving at my door as if he’s already dead. Abby has been calling everyone, and my father is here, my mother, too, and my oldest friend in the world, Anna Jane. Bethy and Kristen are in the kitchen, sobbing onto the shoulders of their friends, and Ian’s sister, Olivia, asks questions of me as if she’s a prosecuting attorney. Of course, she sounds that way every Thanksgiving. It’s how she is. My father is on the phone, talking to I don’t know who. Hospitals, morgues, police departments of other counties. He’s working from a list he found on the Internet. I hear my mother say,
Why are you doing that right now? Sometimes you just need to be here
, but he ignores her.
We don’t need you to be the hero
, she says, and then looks at Anna Jane and rolls her eyes.

I’m grateful for what he’s doing, though. It’s motion, and I can witness some sort of progress. He, Nathan, and Ian’s friend Simon Ash have also gone door-to-door on our dock, talking to people, asking if they’ve seen Ian or heard anything. They drove up and down our streets and the streets near Ian’s work. They returned looking exhausted, but Simon promised to do the same thing in Ian’s old neighborhood the next day. Olivia suggests calling airlines. Simon tells her that they won’t give out information unless there’s a subpoena. They argue this point. Simon is a contract lawyer and Olivia is an elementary school teacher, so he seems to win. She purses her lips and turns away.

Abby has taken one of our wedding photos and cropped me out, making flyers with Ian’s face on them. Underneath, it says:
Have you seen this man?
She gives a handful to everyone to post. Paula, Ian’s secretary, takes a copy and promises to print more at the office. She’ll hand them out to everyone there, and she’ll assign
various employees to various jobs, such as questioning various store owners in various locations. Someone has made a color-coded map. Bethy’s boyfriend, Adam, is walking around and talking on his phone, plugging one ear with his forefinger to hear better. My sister calls and insists on taking the next flight out, reluctantly changing her mind after I beg her not to. I am worried that all these well-meaning people are working so hard when Ian might be gone because he wants to be gone. I tell my sister that I don’t need her yet but might need her later.
Later
—what that might entail, I have no idea.

In spite of this onslaught of help, I am desperately hoping they’ll all leave soon. I can’t
wait
properly with all of these people and emotions and relationships in the room. Most of all, I want to sit and rock and listen for him to come home.

Finally, everyone does leave, everyone except Abby, who has packed a bag and moved into our back bedroom. No one has ever slept there before. The bed is Abby’s from our old house. Boxes from our move are still stacked in there, the tape lifted once and then patted back down. It’s all the stuff you look at and don’t know what to do with now that it doesn’t fit into your new life.

Abby cleans up the mess from the impromptu vigil. She picks up the cans of soda the girls left on the deck rails, empties the overflowing garbage, and gathers the Subway wrappers from the sandwiches that Anna Jane brought because
we still had to eat
. Then Abby hunts through the canvas duffel she’s brought. She takes out a paper bag with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in it.

“I got this on the way over. It seemed necessary. I don’t even know what this stuff is.” She removes the cap, sniffs. “Holy crap. That just burned a fire through my nasal passages.” She pours us each a large glass.

“Honey, that’s way too much.” Abby isn’t a drinker. She tries to pour some of it back through the narrow neck of the bottle, but most of it spills on the counter. It’ll probably take the varnish right off the wood trim. Ian won’t be pleased.

We each have a few swallows, which is followed by an array of gasping and sputtering and coughing. “It
is
nice and relaxing,” Abby says after a while. We sit in silence, until the alcohol catches up to us.

“I’ve got to go to bed,” Abby says.

“Okay, sugar.”

“Is it okay to ditch you?”

“Of course.”

“Double hugs,” she says, and leans down to give me two.

“Double hugs,” I say.

I try to sleep, I do. I even undress and lie down. The house is quiet and dark now. I listen to the crickets outside and to some far-off airplane. It’s too hot in here. Someone has turned the heat up way past where we keep it. I can’t stay in the same sheets Ian and I have recently been in together. Maybe some people would find that comforting, but I don’t. It’s a bed of mixed emotions. Beds often are, even in the best of circumstances. I get up. In the living room, Pollux lifts his chin from his pillow and watches me, decides it’s not worth the effort to follow. He tucks his chin back down again. He’s been up way past his bedtime, too, with all those people around. I open the sliding door to the deck and sit down in one of the Adirondack chairs. I pull my robe around me. My phone is in my pocket in case Ian calls.

If you have taken off somewhere, I am going to be so fucking mad at you
, I tell Ian, wherever he is. The moon is large and white (he’s under it, too, somewhere) and the water out there shimmers with light. I can smell the deep murkiness of the lake. The dock
groans and creaks and sways a little—soft, lulling rhythms. The
New View
sloshes and bumps against the dock.

The party, the drive home, the grim face.

I try and try to remember.

The cool sheets. The bliss of rest.

I take my phone from my pocket. Her name and number are still on my list of contacts. I dial.

You have reached the office of Dr. Shana Berg. If this is an emergency, please dial 911 …

I listen to her voice, wait to leave a message, but there’s a beep on my phone. It’s the double ring of another call coming in. It’s midnight. It’s him, of course it is. Who else? He’s heard about the commotion here tonight, and he’s feeling bad that he’s worried all those people. I feel sick with fear and relief. I feel joy, and fear and sickness, but, thank God, whatever it is, now I’ll know. I punch the button on the phone and wait to hear Ian’s voice.

“Dani?”

“Yes?”

“It’s Nathan.”

“Nathan?”

“I’m sorry to call so late. I really am. So many people were there tonight … I wanted to talk to you, but …”

“What, Nathan? What? Do you know something? You know something.”

He is quiet. For a moment I think we’ve lost the connection. “Nathan?”

“I think maybe we should meet.”

When I was a child in the suburbs of Seattle during the 1970s, we lived next door to Mr. and Mrs. Harris, who were quiet and kept to themselves, even on Halloween, when they turned their porch light off. They were the only ones who did that, the one
dark house on that street. One summer, I was sure that Mr. Harris had done in Mrs. Harris and their small dog, Trixie. I hadn’t seen Mrs. Harris’s large, floral-clad rear end bent over in the garden for a number of days, and I hadn’t seen Trixie flinging her small body against our shared fence whenever we let our cat out. But Mr. Harris kept coming home from work every night at six
P.M
., same as ever. It seemed possible that Mr. Harris had buried Mrs. Harris right under one of those flat, cement squares of their back patio, because he was a funeral director and because school was out and I was bored. For a long while, it was my understanding that this was where they put all the bodies from O’Dooley’s Funeral Home: beneath their patio, under the Harrises’ barbecue and Mrs. Harris’s tomato plants, the very place where Mrs. Harris sunned herself on a tippy, webbed chaise longue, slathering on the Sea & Ski and drinking Tab out of the can.

I spied on Mr. Harris for a few days and took notes in a spiral pad I’d decorated with a cool STP sticker. He washed his car. He hauled out his garbage cans. He turned on their sprinkler and forgot to turn it off until late at night, when the lawn was soaked. I watched too much
Dragnet
with my father, too much
Adam-12
. I read
Two-Minute Mysteries
and
Encyclopedia Brown
and
Nancy Drew
, and funeral directors seemed likely capable of anything.

Mrs. Harris and Trixie returned, though, after apparently spending several weeks at the local Travelodge. I heard my mother tell my friend Becky’s mom that Mr. Harris had gotten involved with someone he worked with at O’Dooley’s. This was extraordinarily creepy. Thrillingly so. I couldn’t imagine how Mrs. Harris could let Mr. Harris touch her after a day at work, let alone fathom an O’Dooley’s
couple
. I was ten, and the funeral home was in a large, chalky mansion in town, and I pictured Mr.
Harris and some woman with pancake makeup doing it in a red velvet casket.

Mrs. Harris was alive and well, but her marriage was dead, and even though I didn’t realize it then, the mystery was likely deeper than I ever could have imagined. Human nature deep. I’ve said it before, but in marriage there are things you don’t know about your partner. Always. The real thoughts in his head as he drifts off to sleep with his shoulders turned away from you—you can’t even guess. But you want to believe you
do
know. That a person
is
knowable. You need this belief. It’s a necessary denial. How can you go about everyday life otherwise? How could you ever water the tomato plants and unfold your chaise longue and enjoy a summer afternoon if you knew there were things buried under the cement patio of your very own yard?

“When can I see you?” I say to Nathan Benjamin.

5

“Mom? Mom!”

I rise through the shadow layers of sleep, untangling nightmare images from waking ones. When I open my eyes, I’m almost surprised to find myself in my own bed. Abby is there in her pajamas with the dancing dogs on them, the ones my mother made her for Christmas. Her face has the sweet plainness of no makeup, framed by shoved-up, bedraggled hair. But she also has that look she gets, a mix of worry and concentration. I first saw it when we made the papier-mâché horse for her third-grade report on
Misty of Chincoteague
.

“Are you okay? Jesus, you scared me.”

“A bad dream …”

“You were crying out.”

“I don’t know. It’s already gone. I don’t even remember.”

The abrupt yank into wakefulness is confusing, until my real life efficiently barges in and takes over duty again. I hate that disorienting moment in the morning, I’ve always hated it—that brief empty in-between before you remember your life’s plotline. The blankness is the perfect setup for a nasty surprise, and I’m not fond of
surprises. It can go either way, of course. Sometimes what returns to you upon waking is good news.
That’s right, I’ve fallen in love!
Or,
Oh, yeah! Today my new boots are coming in the mail!
But, other times, what reappears is the knowledge that your child is sick or that the kitchen flooded the day before. The bad stuff forgotten in sleep comes rushing back, and it’s new all over again. Every single time, it’s a split second of fresh pain or joy or thrill or doom.