He's Gone (24 page)

I laughed. I loved the idea of it, even after all those years.
Can you imagine?
I said. What a thrilling thought.
I never could have done it
.

Why not?

It would have been wrong. I was always trying to be good
.

Good
. She let the word sit there in the room.

Such a simple word
. I shook my head.
It’s supposed to be so clear, too. Good, bad, right, wrong
.

Good has been complicated for you
.

Well, look. I was always so nice, and now I’ve got this scarlet A on my chest
.

Nice is often just powerlessness with a smile
.

I quit seeing Dr. Shana Berg after Ian moved out for the last time, a few months after his first attempt. I got too busy. I was taking on as much work as I could, and I was trying to build a life with Ian. I started canceling appointments. It seemed like a waste of time. It wasn’t cheap, either. I didn’t like the direction she and I were going, anyway.

Oh, boy, that must have made you so mad
, she said, after Ian went out to dinner with Mary. Even after he left home, he was still doing stuff like that.
You probably want to tell him where he can shove it
.

She was the only one I was getting mad at. Dr. Shana Berg, she just kept kicking the opossum who was playing dead. But that opossum was playing dead because it was a survival mechanism, built into the DNA from the time opossums first walked our fiery earth and useful every damn day since.

After Nathan and I hang up, I sit there in the bedroom. Night is the worst. Ian is
gone;
I can’t see him or talk to him or reach him or ask him a simple question, and the truth of that becomes agonizing after dark. And then there’s the bed, our bed. A bed has stories. It has a complex past. It lacks the innocence of other furniture. In it, there are memories of lovemaking and angry shoulders and secret thoughts in your own head and silly conversations before sleep. Ian and I once spent hours talking about candy we liked from childhood. Cola-flavored Bottle Caps, tiny Chiclets, peanut butter Mountain Bars, Zotz. He remembered how raw your tongue got from sucking on those extra-large Sweet Tarts. I remembered the planetary rings of the half-eaten jawbreaker. We’ve argued in our bed and made up there. We planned a vacation and wrote grocery lists there. A bed is a couple’s own small continent.

And then there’s the darkness itself. In darkness, every line sunk down deep can be reeled in. Every vulnerability, every black thought—they surface. There are the noises, too, the ones you never hear in the day, some squeak that might be a footstep, a disturbing hum from an otherwise silent appliance; there is the ticking clock and your own loud heartbeat. Your sweater over that chair is an ominous, bulky form. Your coat on a hook is a stranger in your bedroom. Ghosts never show themselves in the daylight. Nightmares don’t come during an afternoon nap.

Sleep might mean that dream. His hands would be on my wrists, pinned above my head like a butterfly’s wings on a foam board.
The best way to kill one
, he told me once,
is to press its thorax between your thumb and forefinger. It takes a lot of practice to apply the right pressure. Not too much or too little; enough to stun it without damaging its body
.

I curl up on our continent, pull the covers up. I could wrap myself in white sheets and be transformed in sleep. But, no, the wind is still pitching our house, enough that the door swings and then clicks closed. A banging starts. That damn boat has come loose again. I remember that sound from the morning he went missing. It’s the sound between before and after. I’d been happy then. Or, at least, I’d been innocent.

I get up.
Damn it!

Pollux rouses and his eyes blink, confused at these unexpected nocturnal events. I open the back door. The wind knocks over the card my friend Anna Jane sent, which Abby had propped on the kitchen counter. It’s cold out there. I’m wearing only a T-shirt and a pair of underwear, and goose bumps crawl over my skin. I kneel on the dock. It occurs to me—kneeling and praying. Maybe that’s what I should be doing every single night. Getting down on my knees.

I look around. I try to figure out what’s going on. A cleat is a
little loose, that’s the problem. I can see that now. It’s jiggly, and the rope frees itself as the cleat rotates. I tighten it with my fingernail. That’ll work for now. I’ll have to screw it down properly in the morning.

I reach out for the rope, and I secure it to the cleat as best as I can. The
New View
is tight against the dock now. It’s so dark out there, and the lake is choppy in the whistling wind. All the lights of the houseboats on the dock are off. I feel uneasy. It’s unsettling, it really is, the way this home of ours is surrounded by water.

11

Mary was the one who had the balls enough to finally make Ian choose between us. That’s why he moved out for the last time. You know, good for her. I was oddly proud of her. I wish I had been the one to be strong like that.

Ian brought me to a small lakefront park near our neighborhood to tell me. There we were, in a park in public during the daytime, where anyone might see us. It seemed so open. It felt strange to not hide.

We don’t have to hide anymore
, he said, reading my mind. He held my hands. He looked deeply into my eyes.
I’ve decided
.

I wasn’t sure what my response was supposed to be. Excited? Respectfully somber? Mary must have been devastated, and I’m not a person who rejoices in my own victory. In any competition, I always feel bad for the loser. Watching sporting events on television, even a cooking-show contest—I am sad for the defeated team, or the one in second place, pushed behind the winner at the end of the season as the confetti falls from the ceiling. Those poor women with their failed cupcakes, even. They did their best. I once won a spelling bee in sixth grade, and I shared my candy with Allison Leffler, who got the silver ribbon.

Ian, too—this was thrilling and long-awaited news, but he looked exhausted. His eyes were tired, dead. We were both exhausted. We’d had one passionate and adulterous year and another one and a half years of mutual, hellish marital collapse. It did not seem like we were at the start of something great, more like we were in the middle of an impossible, arduous race that might never end. There were no rainbows on the horizon for us to skip toward.

We walked back to the car. I was still glancing over my shoulder, expecting to see Neal or Rob or Jason’s mother, all of whom might stone Ian and me if they saw us together. There was a baseball practice going on nearby, the little team in their red striped shirts and important socks, and you could hear the metal ping of ball against bat, the cheers of support—
Go! Go! Go!
—for the red-striped runner. That baseball game where we’d met seemed like a lifetime ago.

Ian’s decision to leave changed everything with Mary, of course. Gone was the hand-holding and talk of change and sex every night and even the hairstyle that looked like mine. He was going to pay. People play nice until they know it’s really over. It makes you realize how much of a relationship can be a strategy to get your needs met.

Mary was thunderous once more as the marriage crashed down, cataclysmic, as Mark continued to propel my attorney’s bills into stratospheric figures. The person you want to leave is the one you’ll have to divorce. Now, there’s a piece of advice; remember that. It was Shakespearean. It was ordinary. Dr. Shana Berg shrugged her shoulders.
In long-standing marriages, ninety percent of the divorces involve infidelity. No one likes to leave alone. But no one likes being left even more. So it goes
.

So it goes
? I had said. The world was crashing and burning.

Remember when you were pregnant and it felt like no one had ever been pregnant before?

I nodded.

These things happen
.

This was not the way we should have done it. That’s one thing I know
.

She bobbed her tea bag in her cup.
It wasn’t the best plan, but it was a plan
.

“We’d like to go over your story one more time,” Detective Jackson says on the other end of the phone.

“I don’t understand.”

My mother and Abby and my dear friend Anna Jane watch me anxiously.
What?
my mother mouths at me. Anna Jane begins picking up breakfast plates. When nervous, she always gets busy. When her own mother was ill, she was the one who interviewed doctors and picked up prescriptions. This morning, she’d arrived at the houseboat with coffee cake. My sister had sent a box of homemade chocolate crinkles, with their cracked desert landscape of powdered sugar. Oh, the women in my life, we feed our misery.

“We’d like you to come in.”

“I’ll do anything you need, but I don’t understand.…”

“Some people have some concerns.”

“I’m sure you mean Bethy and Kristen. We have a history, Detective. They don’t exactly love me. They see me as the reason their father left their mother.”

My own mother lets out an angry huff, and Abby covers her face with her hands.

“They have some concerns about the state of your relationship with Mr. Keller.”

“They’ve always had concerns about the state of our relationship.”

“We can discuss that when you come in.”

“Fine.” I hear the edge in my voice and regret it.

“Oh, and we’d like you to bring in your personal computers. His and yours. This is voluntary, of course. It may give us some helpful information.” He sounds cheerful, as if we’re exchanging recipes. “We’re not charging you with anything.”

“Oh, my God, I hope not.”

I hang up. I put a hand over my mouth, in shock. I think I might be sick.

Anna Jane moves away from the dishwasher, sets her arm around my shoulders.

“They want me to come in. They want the
computers
.”

My mother slams her hand down on the table, causing the remaining dishes to jump. “Goddamn it. I am so goddamn mad. What are these fucking idiots doing? What a fucking waste of time. It’s those girls, isn’t it? And their
mother
. You want to look anywhere, it should be
there
.”

Anna Jane’s voice is soft. “I think you need an attorney.”

“Oh, God,” Abby groans.

“I don’t need an attorney.”

Pollux feels the anxiety in the room. He begins to whine and trot around.

“Bruce had a drunk-driving offense.” Bruce was Anna Jane’s brother.

“You never told me.”

“He was so embarrassed. Anyway, they used this guy …”

“Your father’s divorce attorney, he was a real tough bastard,” my mother says. “Frank Lazario. I’ll never forget
his
name. Scary to even look at. Probably Mafioso. He had one of those alcoholic noses.…”

“Grandma, the guy’s probably dead by now.”

We’re all silent. No one has anything else to offer. This is the
extent of our experience with lawyers. “I’m not getting an attorney. They can look at the computers all they want. I have nothing to hide. They’re not charging me with anything.”

I sound so brave and sure. I think of Detective Jackson outside at night, watching my street.

“They’re just doing their job,” Abby says.

“That’s right. Let them have what they need. Maybe they’ll find something on his laptop that we didn’t find. This is good. This is okay.”

“That mother. That’s who they should be talking to,” my mother says. “If I were her, I’d want to kill him.”

Anna Jane catches my eye. We have a silent, mutual recognition of my mother’s insensitivity. “Hey,” she says, as if she’s suddenly had a brilliant idea. “If you need a lawyer, you could always call Mark.”

I laugh; I can’t help it. My mother chuckles, too. Even Abby tries to suppress a grin but smiles anyway. The year that Mark acted as his own attorney has become family lore. He’d been nicknamed Perry Mason and Atticus Finch and, most often, Clarence, as in Darrow. The humor grew as the bills mounted and the situation became ever darker.

“Sorry, Abby,” Anna Jane says.

But even Abby knows that this is what we do when things get their blackest. “Hey, no worries. I’ll call him and see if he’s got an appointment.”

“I only want the best,” I say. “Gotta keep me out of the slammer.” The idea seems so ridiculous, it’s only right to joke. “Can you see it? Me in the exercise yard?”

“With your book. Sitting in a sunny corner,” Abby says.

“At least you’d never have to worry about what to wear again.” Anna Jane knows me well.

“There’s always a silver lining,” I say.

“Maybe you’ll meet some nice dyke in there,” my mother says.

My mother always goes too far.

I pick up Pollux to stop his pacing and whining. I put my face against him. “It’s okay, boy. Everything is all right.”

He squirms dangerously, does a half flip out of my arms. It’s a wild circus move. He’s as unconvinced as the rest of us.

I try to keep the panic down. The idea of me being charged with something, arrested … It’s too far-fetched, and that’s a good place in which to rest. This would never happen. But other things that would never happen already have. I woke up one morning to find that my husband had vanished. That should have been impossible, too.

Anna Jane comes to the police station with me. It’s a Sunday, the day of the week when people go to church or stay in bed late and read the newspaper. It’s the day of French toast. But I am going to the police station. Let me say that again. I am going to the
police station
. Because my husband is missing. Because they want to ask me questions about his disappearance. God, even as I write these words, I still can’t believe it.

Anna Jane drives, which is a good thing, because I haven’t yet dealt with that rattle in my car. All I need now is to get stuck somewhere. On the freeway, even; I can just see it.