He's Gone (18 page)

“BethyKristen,” my mother says. She’s breathing down my neck.

“Tried that,” I say. “Like a hundred times. We started with that two hours ago.” I sound like an eye-rolling adolescent on TV, but I’m exhausted. I’ve run the gamut of emotions today, and my ill temper is all that’s left.

“
Your
name?” Abby says. She’s leaning over my other shoulder.

“Come on, folks. We’ve tried that a million times, too.” I type it in again anyway. Nothing.

“One, two, three, four,” my mother says.

“He would never choose something that obvious.”

“Twenty-six, fourteen, five, twelve.” Abby elbows my mother. I can hear the barely stifled laugh that’s about to erupt from her. My mother snorts out her nose. She can’t hold back, begins chuckling.

“You guys,” I say.

Abby swats Mom. “Stop that, Grandma.”

“You’re the one.” She gives Abby a little shove back. For God’s sake, they’re two kids in the back of the car. “Try six, seventeen, two, five hundred.”

Abby snorts out her nose now. This has been going on for too long, hours, and now they’re sliding into fatigued hilarity, where an exhale from a cushion could become fart-like high comedy.

“Just try some random word,” Abby suggests. I rub my temples.

“Like
boner
,” my mother says.

They both crack up. “Grandma!”

“We’re done here,” I say. This isn’t exactly funny. This is beyond inappropriate.

“You can’t give
up
,” Abby says. “Maybe it’s a combination of words.”

“Like
priest boner
.” Mom’s shoulders are going up and down in suppressed hysterics.

“Clown boner,”
Abby says. They both bust up. My mother’s eyes are watering, she’s laughing so hard.

“God,” she says.

“Try that one,” Abby says. More hysterical laughing.

“Fine. We’re done. Jesus, people.”

“Monarch,” my mother says, out of nowhere.

I type.
Tip, tip, tip
. And, oh, dear God, the enchanted doors part. They do. It’s a miracle. The password screen disappears. I can’t believe it, I really can’t. Small icons of possibilities show themselves.

“I got it!” my mother yells. “I got it!” She starts jumping up and down, and Abby is jumping with her, and they are hugging and squealing as if my mother just won the Chrysler LeBaron on
The Price Is Right
.

Well, of course you shift loyalties when you’re being unfaithful. Of course you do. I’ve always felt that a heart is meant to be given to only one person at a time. And, too, when it moves on, it moves on for good. Hearts are pretty decisive, unlike heads. The loyalty shift—it showed itself in trivialities. When I got a new client or worried over my mammogram results, it was Ian, not Mark, I wanted to tell. When Ian was stressed about making a product deadline, he talked it over with me, not Mary. If I saw some funny or sad thing—a toddler making a crafty escape from his stroller, an odd couple with especially tall hair, a rickety old lady crossing a busy street—I shared it with Ian. Ian got it into his head that he wanted this newer, faster motorcycle, something Mary would never approve of, and I encouraged it. I was
go-for-it
. I was
let’s-do-it
. I wouldn’t have wanted Mark to have a
motorcycle, to tell you the truth. As the other woman, though, you’re the one who’s supposed to open the windows to a bigger world. That’s your promise. A bigger world with more sex, or something like that.

We closed in around our secret and grew something that was just ours, selfishly and totally ours, and there aren’t many things like that in a life, things that are just yours. Of course, the moment you let it out into the world it’s not yours anymore, and, of course, you want it out in the world. I wanted to go to restaurants, to movies. We both did. After more than a year of sneaking around, fourteen months from the day we met, I was tired of lying. I was tired of negotiating the parking brake. We were all over each other once, my shirt nearly off, when there was a tap at the car window. It was a policeman, patrolling the park. We had to hand over our licenses as I clutched my top to my chest. We both felt like guilty teenagers, only worse—there were different last names and addresses on those licenses, and there were those wedding rings, and we were too old to be caught in a car. The guy probably went back to the station and told everyone and had a good laugh. Ian hated to be laughed at. I didn’t mind. His ego had been battered enough that the touch of a fingertip caused a bruise, and mine had been battered enough that it didn’t even know when it was being pummeled.

During that time, I have to admit, there was something thrilling about turning my back on Mark every night in bed. He was right beside me, but I left him and went to this place in my head—it felt like an actual
place
—where I could relive that day’s conversation with Ian, the loving words, or a touch, or a long gaze, or talk of the future. I could feel Mark shifting around in bed, but I shut him out. It was powerfully punishing. He sensed my retreat and went either stony or desperate. He used to twine a lock of my hair around and around his finger to help him sleep,
like a child with the corner of a blanket, but when he did that then, I’d pull away. My hair was my own. I didn’t want to be used for comfort anymore. People who kick dogs—they pet them, too.

I let Mark find out. I suppose it’s what an employer with any heart does before a round of layoffs—he drops hints of cutbacks and profit losses before delivering the pink slip. There were those shoulders turned away from him, first of all, and long stares out windows. Finally, an email left where he could see it.

I left an angry man by having an affair. As Dr. Shana Berg said, it wasn’t a very good plan, but it was a plan.

You snip a thread, and … Wait. I’m remembering my first communion, when I was eight. My father grew up Catholic, and, therefore, so did we. At least, we check-marked the regular boxes—baptism, first communion. I was dressed like a little bride. White dress, white veil, white shoes and stockings. It’s one of those things (like Christmas trees, neckties, camping) that make the human race particularly hard to fathom. My father had the car running and my mother was yelling that we were late, when I noticed a fuzzy nub on my thick tights. I made a quick cut with my kiddie scissors, and as soon as I got into my father’s baby-blue Chevrolet Impala, the unraveling had begun. One small clip and so much damage can be done. The tights were in shreds by the time we reached the church. My mother noticed as we walked up the path; she let out a shriek that turned the head of Father Dominique, in his white robes with the gold trim. My stockings kept unraveling and unraveling until they were ribbons of disgrace, drooping across my leg as I received the white wafer on my tongue in front of that crowd. My mother was furious. We ate cookies and drank punch at a party afterward, as the run slithered down into my shoe. No one thought to just take the shameful things off.

A single snip is what I’m saying.

Of course, things got broken after Mark found out about Ian and me. The first thing was the tile countertop in our kitchen, as he slammed his fist into it again and again. Things get broken, and no matter how well they were put back together, you knew where the crack in that tile was.

A quick look at Ian’s documents and his email tells me there are no immediate answers on his laptop. There are no suicide notes on his desktop or flight itineraries in his mailbox. There is no email from another woman left where I can see it. Delving further will take hours, and I’m too depleted for that.

“I can’t,” I say. “Tomorrow.”

“We need fooood,” Abby whines. She used to get like this whenever we went school-clothes shopping. I’d buy her an Orange Julius to bribe another half hour out of her.

“I can run out and get us teriyaki,” my mother says.

I groan. Nothing sounds good.

“You’ve got to eat,” Abby says. “The ass of your jeans is getting baggy. Eggs?” I rub my eyes. Decisions about food can sometimes feel mammoth and complex. Should we have Italian or Mexican? Should we land the troops on the beach or attack the enemy by air? I feel this way on an ordinary day.

“I’ll handle it,” Abby says.

My mother is already rooting around in my fridge, which is irritating me. A fridge is as private as your purse, or else I
am
hungry, hungry enough to be rattled by anything. We all hear it: My stomach growls like a creaking door.

“I hope an alien doesn’t burst out of your chest,” Abby says.

My mother finds what she wants. “Help is on the way,” she
says, holding up a bottle of red wine. Ian makes fun of the fact that I like my red wine cold.

It’s a wine crime
, I replied once.
Arrest me
.

Don’t let Nathan see that
, Ian had said. Nathan is a wine connoisseur. He has one of those mini-cellars in his town house. The wine choice is always up to him when we have dinner together, but he’s not a snob about it.

He wouldn’t care. He never even swirls his glass
.

I’d
care
.

Next time, I’m really gonna go crazy and drink red with fish. Twenty-five years to life
.

Hilarious
.

I hope you’re a tree stump in your next life
. Joking was one way to deal with his criticisms. There were other ways. Distraction, anger. You try everything.

Thanks
.

Tree stumps don’t worry about what people think of them. It’d be very freeing
.

Pour me a glass, smart-ass
, he’d said.

“Pour me a glass,” I say to my mother.

She holds three wineglass stems in her hand expertly, tucks the bottle under her arm like a well-trained sommelier. It’s rather impressive, actually. “Let’s get some air.”

Mom tries to open the sliding door with her foot. “Let me get that,” I say. It’s beautiful out on the lake. Spring air is mingling sweetly with hopeful, dusk light. The evening smells so good, I could drink it from a great big cup. The edges of the waves are silvery-white and bittersweet. The
New View
sloshes merrily against the side of the dock. Abby clatters pans in the kitchen. Pollux rediscovers his youth and bounds with great speed out the open door.

Mom settles in a deck chair, pops the cork. It sounds wrongly celebratory. She pours me a glass. I gratefully sit in the lounge chair beside her and sip my wine. It’s a cheap bottle bought from Pete’s—I’m not a connoisseur. I buy bottles because they’re on sale and I like the label.

“Monarch.” My mother leans back and smiles. She is still pleased with herself.

My mind works the knot, endlessly so, but I’m not getting anywhere. “He wouldn’t have committed suicide,” I say. I’ve said this a hundred times by now. I stare out at the lake, at a large sailboat, the
Lucky Lady
, which swoops past. The captain waves at us, and his windbreaker flaps cheerfully. He has no idea we’re discussing a person taking his own life.

“I wondered that at first. But Ian thinks too highly of himself to do that.” My mother’s cheeks are already red after only two sips of wine.

“You know it’s not a high opinion. You know it’s hiding—”

“Oh, God, please. Don’t say it. ‘Self-hatred.’ ‘Low self-esteem.’ I think we used the same excuse for Mark.”

I stare at her, shocked. Hurt. She flutters her hand, implying that she means no harm. It stings, though. Well, the truth does. “You keep confusing the one who’s saving you with the one who’s drowning you.”

“I don’t think now’s the time for relationship advice,” I say.

“Now’s exactly the time.”

My chest is burning; I can feel red cinders under my skin, the buried fire of anger. I don’t want to fight with her. Best to stay on her good side, anyway—when she’s mad, watch out. “I was
saying
, I don’t think he would have committed suicide. It’s against his deepest beliefs. His religion …”

Back in the day, Ian’s mother went to a school taught by Jesuits. Her room at the care facility still has a gory, sad-eyed Jesus on
a cross above the doorway. The lessons of Ian’s childhood are there in bottomless, sunken grooves, even if he doesn’t go to church. The concept of sin is real to him. He’s shocked me more than once, talking about Adam’s rib or “the flood.” I always want to laugh, but he’s serious. I had some naïve belief that we were all sort of past that stuff. He went to graduate school, you know? I mean, he’s a logical person. He’s studied math and science. But, to Ian, logic and religion are sold separately.

“Christians are so mean,” my mother says.

“Remember when I shredded my tights at my first communion?”

“You had first communion?”

“You sewed the dress.”

“Don’t remember.”

“I was a little bride.”

“I should never have let your father talk me into that.”

Pollux is sniffing around the edges of the dock, intent on some canine investigation. He’s perilously close to the edge. My mother has her eye on him, too, the way she probably watched us as toddlers near the neighbors’ swimming pool. “He won’t fall in …”

“No. He hates the water.”

“He looks like he’s going to fall in.”

“He’s a very capable dog.”

“He barks when the doorbell rings on TV,” she says.

“Don’t say that so loud. You’re a champion dog,” I say to him. “A prizewinner.”

Now Abby opens the door with
her
foot. “Gourmet meal for three.”

I jump up. “Let me help …”

“Damn, that looks good,” my mother says.

“Hey, I’m a grilled-cheese maestro, what can I say.”

“Dill pickles, too.” I feel the momentary delight of a perfect
meal—grilled cheese, potato chips, sliced dill pickles. In the grimness of these days, I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but there it is. Brief moments of goodness are shockingly persistent. You’re in the dark, darker, darkest, and yet there’s a dog sitting beside you, on his best behavior for a dropped crust, and there’s an industrious line of ducks paddling past, and there’s a grilled-cheese maestro. Life insists.