He's Gone (2 page)

He’ll never know I was out here in my robe, either. He’d have an issue with that, as crazy as it sounds. He’s possessive, and it gets irritating. From the way he acts, you’d think the sight of me would draw in the crowds of drooling men out there on their boats. My mom robe, with the bleach stain on the front and the Kleenex in my pocket, is sexy as hell, and all of them will be lining up for sure, just waiting to get a glimpse of me wrapped in terry cloth. Not a big thrill, I promise you. Maybe our neighbor, old Joseph Grayson, might think so, but he’s stoned half the time.

It
is
a cloudy morning, but they’re the kind of clouds that are rushing off as if they have better things to do. The sun is fighting its way out. I tie the boat down and I’m struck by how beautiful it is on the lake. It hits you sometimes like that, and so I stand there and take it all in. After we’d been married for two years and Abby had graduated and headed to the UW dorms, we moved to Lake Union from The Highlands, that neighborhood on the other side of the bridge that held so much of our tangled
history. We (well, Ian) bought our large houseboat at the end of the dock. Whenever I say
houseboat
to people who aren’t from the city, they think we drive it around. I have to explain that it’s not a boat but a floating home, like in
Sleepless in Seattle
, only Meg Ryan had better hair than I do. Ian has better hair than Tom Hanks, but Pollux has better hair than all of us, and he’s so humble about it, too.

The view from our home is similar to the one from Ian’s office up on Queen Anne Hill, but at the houseboat it’s spread out in front of us rather than seen from above. Lake Union, the Space Needle, various boats chugging past, seaplanes landing—you feel as if the city is
yours
out there, that you belong to it, and it to you.
I never want to live anywhere else
, Ian said once.
I could die here and be happy
. I knew what he meant. It feels so great right at this moment, even after wiping up pee and with a bad headache and with the feeling that things had gone wrong again between Ian and me the night before. I still feel mostly good, because some ducks paddle past, and then so do a pair of kayakers. The woman in the back waves and I wave, too, and I breathe in and notice that the daffodil bulbs in the pots on the deck are coming up, little arrowheads of green.

I decide against going back to bed. I put a pot of coffee on.
Ian must have been in a rush to get out of here this morning
, I think, because he hasn’t even made any coffee, and Ian needs his coffee. I also think this:
He could be out at Louisa’s right now, bringing us home a pair of foamy lattes and some raspberry muffins, and if he shows up with that fabulous white bag and two cardboard cups, I’ll just consider this batch of French Roast my coffee appetizer
. So the pot burbles and I pour Pollux his same old brown breakfast that he’s so thrilled about every single day, and I take that perfect first cup of the morning onto the deck, along with a couple of aspirins. I sit on one of the Adirondack chairs we have out there. I
smell the arrival of Northwest spring, and the smell of bacon cooking somewhere, and the smell of gasoline drifting over water. All three of those smells I love. Pollux trots out again, with water droplets on his beard. He squints into the early sun and looks out over the lake like the patron saint of sailors he’s named for. What a good boy.

I sip that coffee, and the steam rises up in the coolness of morning, and Pollux lays his old self down in a spot of sun. I have one of those moments where you simply feel grateful. My headache is giving up, and the irritation is leaving, too, maybe swept away in the first exhilarating rush of caffeine. A sense of peace takes its place. A rare moment of peace, the kind you take in and vow to hold on to but never can. Those moments are gone at the first traffic jam or botched bank statement, in spite of your best intentions. But it’s there now.

I have no idea is what I’m saying. What I keep trying to say.

I have no idea that my husband has vanished.

2

Every now and then you hear someone say it:
I’ve got no regrets
. It always seems astonishing to me. It sounds so bold. And freeing. And kind of wonderful, but hard to believe. I mean, if you have a conscience at all, you’ll have regrets, won’t you? If you’re honest about your mistakes, small and large? Or even if you only face the facts about how things in your life didn’t turn out the way you imagined they would. I have regrets from just yesterday, when I yelled at Pollux for laying down right in the doorway. I have regrets from back when I was fourteen and I kissed Ethan Gunter out by the Totem Bowl on my first date ever, even though I didn’t like him. He was a little strange. He wore a weird felt hat, and I didn’t exactly say yes to the kiss, but I didn’t say no. I was already giving things just because other people wanted them.

And if you’re a parent—well, right there. Can you honestly say you have no regrets? With all the ways you mess it up, when it’s your best and most important dream to get it right? Parental regrets, those are at the top, all right. Oh, I wanted to be a perfect parent, I did. I read all the books. But my dream of perfect was gone already before my daughter was born, the moment I chose
her father. I didn’t know that when I was nineteen. But you can’t avoid messing up somehow as a parent, can you? I imagine that even those mothers with their perfect organic baby food and their perfect preschools and their perfect gifted programs still send their kids screaming from their loving arms. Too much perfect will likely result in years at the therapist’s office, same as too much imperfect.

But I have other, non-mothering regrets, too. Big ones. The biggest. I have wanted other people’s lives and other people’s houses, and once, this one time, I wanted another woman’s husband. I wanted Ian badly, and what a mess that made. Well he also wanted me badly. Still, you don’t toss that kind of guilt away in some flip comment like
I have no regrets
. I’ve been selfish, but I’m not at heart a selfish person. I’ve hurt people, and I’m ashamed of that.

And this is what I’m thinking about as I wait for him to come home that morning. I’m thinking about our life together and how it came to be. This isn’t some sort of fateful timing; I think about it a lot. Too much. It bothers me. I’m still trying hard to understand where I am and how I got here. My mind picks it up and works on it whenever I have spare, quiet moments, same as some people pick up their knitting.

Peace and gratitude, the peace and gratitude I feel there on that dock with my fingertips rubbing one of Pollux’s silky ears—as I said, it’s a slippery thing. I guess that a sense of peace is slippery for everyone. Regular life and its noises barge in, little daily earthquakes, and any feeling, especially happiness, isn’t allowed to just
be
for long. But for me, it often feels especially hard to hold on to. When it’s good, I don’t always feel that I’ve earned my life or that I got it fair and square.

Of course, there are a hundred reasons why Ian’s divorce happened, most of which have nothing to do with me. I sometimes
forget that. It was a marriage of two real and flawed people who had met very young and who’d barely fit together then, and later not at all. Not for a long while. It would have been someone else if it hadn’t been me; I know that. Still, in a way, I’d stolen it. Him. I’m not a good thief. I’d be the one in the bank heist saying, “I’m so sorry. Really. Whatever you can spare. This isn’t even a real gun.” I’d have to return the next day to give the bags of money back with a note of apology. No matter what the reasons, no matter how well things turn out in the end for everyone, you do wrong and it sits with you, and that’s probably how it should be.

If Ian had gone to Louisa’s, he’d be back by now, I realize, so I pour myself another cup of coffee. I rearrange the chairs outside so that I can sit in one and put my feet up on another. Someone’s dog is swimming out by the adjacent dock. Pollux stands and watches, as if weighing the pros and cons of his own cowardice. He hates the water. As far as athletic endeavors go, he takes after me. More than once, I’ve rowed a kayak smack into the path of a large boat and then, to Ian’s embarrassment and mine, screamed when I finally saw it coming at me. If reading counted as a sport, I’d be a gold medalist. I was an expert at the V-sit in high school P.E. Abby, though—she takes after her father. She’s my daughter, and she’s
athletic
? It seems a miracle. She’s brave. When she was in Little League, she’d stand there at home plate as the baseball whizzed right past her face, and she didn’t even flinch. I
always
flinched.

That’s where Ian and I fell in love—a Little League game. Our daughters were on the same team. I met Ian when he was there being a
father
. Maybe it wouldn’t have happened if we’d met somewhere else. If we bumped into each other on the street
or at Safeway, say. I think, for me, something about those gangly twelve-year-old girls with their ponytails sticking out of their caps and the
ping
of the ball against the metal bat and the cheering—the dust, and the cut-grass smell, and the mothers in their sleeveless tops—it felt like safety, like the kind of childhood you wanted to give your kids, so different from the kind I thought I was giving my daughter. Yeah, that’s it exactly. I think I wanted Ian for her, for Abby, as much as for me. He was a better idea of home.

Of course, he had his own daughter out there. And Abby had her own father.

Ian and I caught eyes at a baseball game, and then we fell in love, and then more deeply in love, and it was passionate and important. So it sounds unromantic to say this, but I wonder if it could have easily been another man for me, just as it would have eventually been another woman for Ian. I was looking for rescue. Because up there behind the chain-link barrier of the team bench stood my own husband, Mark Hastings, assistant coach of the Pink Dragons. The girls chose their own name, and Mark ranted about this one night in bed, going on about how wrong it was that the Cardinals and the Braves and the Giants were gone now in place of the Sweet Rainbows and the Angel Kittens, and probably he had a point. He’d used the word
integrity
. Sports brought out the heroic in him. Sports were the country he was patriotic about. Still, the parents thought he was too intense. I could hear them talking. You could see it on his face right there, as he gripped the chain link of the dugout in his fingers and shouted,
Follow through! Follow through! Don’t be scared of the ball!
Those parents had no idea. His face would get into mine, right up close, and he would scream until I couldn’t hear anything anymore. That hollow, faraway sound would come into my head, the one you hear when you hold your breath and dunk your head underwater
and stay there for a moment. His mouth would be moving, but I would watch it as if it were something separate from him, a curious undulating creature. People flinch at loud noises, or a baseball, or a raised hand, but after a while a flinch can become a permanent condition.

I went to every practice, and so did Ian’s wife, Mary. Mary, who had the name of a Madonna but who was a real person, as we all were. I wonder how that name worked on Ian, though, with his Catholic upbringing and with his own religious mother. Subconsciously, or whatever. I remember seeing Mary there at those practices before I met Ian, talking on her cellphone. I remember an overheard conversation about her husband, who was away in Europe. I remember how she flirted with one of the fathers, Jessica Halloran’s dad, a too-handsome short man who built up his muscles to make up for his stature, the way short men often do. He’d made some joke about her big breasts, which she seemed to somehow be known for, the way some people are known for a particular talent, like playing the piano. She enjoyed his appreciation, I could tell. He lifted her up over one shoulder and carried her around, and her dark hair fell down his back. She laughed teasingly, and after I met Ian, this image replayed in my mind. It said something important about their marriage, I thought, something maybe even he didn’t know.

He showed up at the second game, home from his trip. I only vaguely noticed the back of his expensive-looking T-shirt and jeans as he stood next to another dad during the pregame parent meeting. It was sunny, and all of us were gathered on the sidelines of the baseball diamond in our suburban neighborhood. There was a pool down the street, and an elementary school, and a tennis court. Here, every life looked the same from the outside. Same house, different floor plan; same cars; same backyard patios with barbecues and Costco faux-ceramic pots; same women
with their matching outfits and manicures. My own hands were plain and I knew my own secrets, and so I felt different. My front door was painted in a designer shade just as theirs was, but what happened behind it was mine alone. I thought so, anyway. Probably I wasn’t the only woman whose stomach clutched up in worry whenever her electric garage door went up, that rumbling, grim sound that meant a husband was home. But I felt like I was. The suburbs are one of the loneliest places on earth.

On that sunny spring morning of the Pink Dragons’ second official game, though, as my tennis shoes got dusty from the newly raked baselines, and as the team mom passed around some new, unnecessary handout, Ian turned and looked at me and held my eyes, and something passed between us. I’ve always known right away when someone is going to be important in my life. I’d felt this way with Mark, too, and with all the people who’ve been significant to me. Something shifted. An internal mountain range moved over. One look, and it felt huge. I felt it in my whole body. It seemed like an arrival: of God or fate or the future. Change, announcing itself with silent but circuit-blowing undercurrents.

You could call it love at first sight; we did. It had all the required components of love at first sight—eyes connecting, an electrical charge rarely experienced in a life. Walk around someplace with a lot of people—the mall, an airport—and you realize how great the odds are against such a thing. But rarely, too, do you happen to meet a person whose jagged notches match perfectly with your jagged notches, their key to your lock, damaged roots meeting rightful, barren soil; there are too many metaphors here, but you get the idea. I’ve come to believe that love at first sight is more likely recognition at first sight—a complicated, instantaneous recognition made by a shrewd and cunning inner Cupid. It doesn’t have to be ruinous if what you are viewing
from that deep, crafty submarine scope of the unconscious are the best qualities of old Mom and Dad. But if it locks on to the worst ones, as so often it seems to do, the key opens the lock, and you’re a perfect match, and love at first sight is also disaster at first sight, only you don’t know it yet. You can’t know it or hear it over the roar in your chest.