He's Gone (3 page)

Out on the dock that day, with my coffee cup warming my hands, I relive that particular feeling: I
recognized
him. We barely spoke, yet there it was. This is the part I often play over and over again in my mind—our matched gaze, the sense of importance. Our meeting felt like a reunion. I didn’t attribute this to anything tragic or doomed, not then, anyway; I didn’t see the ancient, wrecked ruins of childhood all around us. No, it felt magical. A coming together again after a long time apart. There was a sense of relief at his appearance in my life—the way you feel when you’ve been standing at the roadside for far too long and then the tow truck arrives.
Oh, there you are
, I wanted to say.
Finally
. He felt the same way, he’d tell me later.
Like we’d been living in wrong, separate countries, lost to each other until right then
. Yeah. Just—at last,
you
.

We caught each other’s eyes, and then he smiled. He looked slightly taken aback. He made some joke, and I laughed. I laughed the way Mary had laughed with small Mr. Halloran, and my laugh felt tacky to me. This is what happens within the daily confines of the suburbs, flirtations and affairs and bored people making passes at other people’s spouses at drunken summer parties as the kids play tag on the cul-de-sac. I didn’t like it. I hated it, actually. It was a cliché, for starters (well, that entire neighborhood was), and it was cheap. The kind of cheap of slurred words and vicious gossip and dirty secrets. It wasn’t the
kind of life I wanted. I liked to go to sleep at night knowing my conscience was clear. I liked simple days of pancakes and the library and helping Abby with some school project involving glue and old magazines. And I liked to think I was a better person than that.

I was aware of his presence throughout that whole game, though. I would watch Mark pace along the baseline, socking his fist into his mitt with a resolute
thwock, thwock
, and I would cheer for Abby when she came up to bat, her eyes serious under her little helmet, and I would watch that new set of shoulders, which were now hunched on the bleachers near me. I had no doubt he was aware of my presence, too. He would glance over his shoulder every now and then. Something had unfurled inside, like a plan, but a plan that had materialized. I guess that’s what fate feels like. I might as well have been sitting in a red plush seat in a theater, watching a film, because I knew that what was going to happen had already happened. It was being set into motion, and it was thrilling and terrifying but, more than anything else, it was a
fait accompli
. Yes. Even though I hate it when someone throws a French phrase into their narrative, that’s the right phrase. Something had finally begun, which meant other things were over. My life wouldn’t forever be what it had been. It was one of the largest moments of my life. Still, if I could undo it all now, I would. I would be braver than I was. I would do things the right way.

You want to be a person who holds your head high, but you are not always that person. This is what happened when our eyes met. Love
and
wrongdoing were that particular truth.

Inside the houseboat, the phone rings. I’ve been thinking so hard about Ian that I’m sure it’s going to be him, calling from his office.
I take my coffee cup inside, and Pollux follows me dutifully. He’s such a hard little worker.

“You’ll never believe what the idiots across the street are doing now.”

It’s not Ian.

“What?” My mother has regular disputes with her neighbors. Garbage-can conflicts, encroaching tree branches, cats using her flower beds for litter boxes.

“They’ve been cleaning up their yard, and—what a fool I am—I thought it looked
great
. A nice big patch in the middle of the lawn … I’m expecting maybe a hydrangea, some nice heather … but, no. Can you hear that?”

I can hear her TV on in her living room, that’s all, and the regular old buzz from the open phone line. Since my mother booted her companion, Douglas Hanks, from her home years ago, she’s lived alone. Douglas Hanks had a roving eye, and, in a last fit of fury, my mother stomped his cowboy hat flat and tossed his collection of 78s. Right afterward, her hair went white, as if shocked by the cruel vagaries of love.

She’s back again. “It’s a damn
chain saw
! It’s been going all morning!”

“I don’t know how you can stand it,” I say. “What are they doing, cutting down a tree?”

“I
wish
. You ready for this? They’re making a totem pole! A fucking totem pole!” The women in my life—my mother, my sister, my good friend Anna Jane, even my daughter—they swear like construction workers. I’m the nun in the family, as far as that goes.

I picture it—a tower of vacant eyes and downturned mouths, the wings of a raven outstretched on top—and I want to laugh. The neighbors are a retired couple who golf a lot and wear matching sweatshirts. They have an American flag flying out
front, too. It
is
bad, though. The large windows of my mother’s Northwest contemporary home face that yard, and the totempole raven will be permanently staring in. “Oh, no. Chain-saw art.”

“You should see the old guy who’s doing it, too. He’s even got suspenders. He looks straight out of
Deliverance
.” My mind clicks along.
Deliverance
, Burt Reynolds, a flashback: my mother’s stashed copy of
Cosmo
when Burt Reynolds was the first male centerfold. I was maybe seven or eight when my sister and I found it in her cedar chest. It’s funny what you remember. I can still see Burt with his deep-black hair and furry body on that white rug, an ashtray beside him. He had those rugged, 1970s sideburns, from the days of gas shortages and Shake ’N Bake and Moon Boots. Isabel Eleanor Ross, my mother, she liked rugged.
A collector’s item
, she’d explained, before snatching it back. Ha.

Right then she gives her voice a hillbilly twang. “ ‘Did you ever look out over a lake and think of somethin’ buried underneath it? Man, that’s just about as buried as you can get.’ ”

“You lost me,” I say.

“It’s from the movie. I just watched it again last weekend. Held up pretty well, I thought. Some of those old films look ridiculous now.”

“I made Abby watch
Born Free
with me once. God, I loved it when I was a kid.”

“You cried like a baby over that lion.”

“
Elsa
. We couldn’t get through more than twenty minutes of it. Abby made fun of me for days. ‘I could see why that made you cry, Mom. I was sobbing myself, it was so bad.’ She thought she was hilarious.”

My mother has stopped listening, though. She’s peeking out her front window again, I’m sure. “I’m going to chop that thing down in the middle of the night.”

Well, she might, too. The evidence supporting that possibility piles up like a memory traffic jam: The time she pulled the stakes out of the Beckers’ tent after she and Patty Becker got in an argument on one ill-fated family camping trip when we were kids. The time she poured a drink on my father’s lap when some woman started dancing provocatively in front of him at a party. The time she screamed
Creep!
at my high school boyfriend when we found out he’d been cheating with Carla Cummings, whose talent, if I recalled correctly, was woodworking. Which brings us full circle.

“Remember Carla Cummings?” I say.

“Who?”

“She won some award in high school for wood shop. Bobby’s girlfriend after me.”

“Well, it’s not her. It’s some old geezer. Honestly, I’m supposed to look at this thing the rest of my life?”

I open the fridge, take a couple of spoons of apple crisp from two nights ago. Apple crisp—a reason to love life. I drop Pollux a bit. He keeps licking his lips afterward, which shows what good taste he has.

“Hey, Mom? I’ve got to go. I think Ian’s home.”

And it’s true. Someone has stepped onto our deck. You can feel when this happens. The houseboat is a large two-story home, one of the largest of the three hundred twenty-four on the lake, but there’s still a slight dip whenever anyone sets foot on the house’s floating platform.

“Where’s he been? It’s Sunday morning! You two have another fight?”

I should never tell her anything. “He was just getting us coffee.”

“Well, that’s better than pulling the wings off insects.”

“Stop,” I say.

“It’s brutal. I should call PETA.”

“That stuff is his father’s. You know that.”

“I’m going to fill
my
yard with garden trolls and flamingos. See how those idiot neighbors like
that
.”

“Good luck, sweetie. I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

I wait for Ian. And I wait. Since he doesn’t come right in, I listen for the creak-woosh of the outdoor faucet turning on—maybe he’s giving the plants a bit of much-needed water. But that doesn’t happen, either. I expect to hear him talking with the neighbors or dumping his trash in the recycling,
something
, but there is no other sound.

I open the front door. A padded envelope falls across the doorway. I pick it up. It has his name on it, but that’s all. I don’t think twice about it. He gets packages all the time. I set it on the kitchen table, where he’ll see it when he comes in. The funny thing is, I’m not even curious.

A few hours pass. I eat a bowl of raisin bran for lunch and promptly rinse the bowl, because raisin bran has a death grip if you let it sit. I’m getting a little pissed—at least he could have left a note. I call his cellphone. It rings and rings, clicks over to his voice mail.
This is Ian Keller; I’m not available to take your call …
I hang up. I call back and leave a message. I huff around at his bad behavior

“You know,
I
would never do that, Poll. I wouldn’t. It’s inconsiderate.” Pollux agrees, I can tell by his eyes. Dogs are most helpful as an excuse for talking to yourself.

I think about what to have for dinner. I stare at the contents of the freezer for far too long. I consider making some cookies for
Ian, which means I want them for myself. Instead, I gather up a load of laundry and toss it into the wash.

On the way back downstairs, I pass our small office. It’s part den, part hobby room. Ian’s desk and leather chair and books are squeezed in there, but so are the two cabinets of thin drawers, the narrow table, and the shelves with supplies stacked neatly on them. After that day at Kerry Park a year ago, that supposed picnic, I don’t think he touched this stuff again. Everything in the room looks the way it has for many months: the spreading board, the boxes of glass-headed pins, the killing jars, and the small bottles of cyanide. They were his father’s things, passed on to Ian while he was still married to Mary, an old pastime of Paul Hartley Keller’s that Ian dutifully tried to take on. I avoid that room. I work from home, doing part-time website design and graphics work for a handful of clients, but I prefer to spread out across the kitchen table rather than use that office. I don’t like the pictures on the walls, those rows of monarchs and painted ladies trapped behind glass. It
is
brutal. He once showed me how to relax a butterfly’s wings so that they could be spread open and pinned down, but I couldn’t stand to watch. I had to leave. I told him I thought the whole thing was gruesome.

People have collected butterflies for years. Scientists
, he’d argued.

I don’t care
, I’d said.
It’s creepy. It’s cruel. You’re not a scientist
.

It’s a way of appreciating their beauty, Dani. Think of it as paying them homage. You’re keeping them perfect forever
.

You pay homage by taking their lives? That makes sense
.

If you don’t get it, you don’t get it
.

I don’t get it. I thought you hated hunting
, I’d said.
You think hunters are terrible people
.

It’s not the same thing at all. Look, Dani, I used to do it with my dad, okay? It means something to me
.

I’d end the argument then, because Ian’s father, Paul Hartley Keller, was the shiny, unattainable prize of Ian’s childhood. His love and approval were always just out of Ian’s reach, which meant that Ian’s feelings for him were as unpredictable as a compass with no true north. We had dinner together, Paul and Ian and me, not long before Paul died, a meal in a restaurant with white napkins and fine wine. He’d flirted with the waitress in spite of his fleshy jowls and the droops of skin under his eyes. He must have thought she didn’t notice these signs of age, or maybe he didn’t notice them himself. To his credit, in spite of the jowls, he looked like a large lion with a gray mane, powerful like that (all right, even virile), but I could hear him breathing heavily. It made me wonder if I remembered any of that CPR we did on that Annie mannequin in high school. How many puffs, how many chest compressions? Paul Hartley Keller’s ego—it was sizable. It was his personal butler, opening doors for him, announcing his presence, never leaving his side. It served him well, too—attracting people to him and then pushing them away when he was through. Ian could become a defenseless, angry, needy (take your pick) little boy around his father. That much was clear.
How are things going with your start-up?
Paul Hartley Keller had asked at dinner, long after Ian’s company was successful.
It’s going great
, Ian had replied, seething, stabbing his meat with the tines of his fork.
Profitable. Too profitable
. Ian was being a bit oversensitive, I thought. Paul Hartley Keller, well, I’ve got to say, he charmed me right out of my good sense.

The butterflies … I’m sure Paul didn’t want that crap in his house anymore. Paul also went through his garage once, shortly after Ian left Mary, when Ian barely had two snitched forks from his old house. Paul gave Ian a bunch of stuff for his new place. He was trying to be helpful in his own way, probably. “It’s the dream kitchen of the 1970s,” Paul had supposedly joked, which
was pretty hilarious, I thought, and true, too. There was a harvest-gold fondue pot, an air popcorn popper, an electric carving knife, and a microwave big enough to drive. Most of it was useless to Ian, but he kept all of it anyway. He saved that stuff for years.