He's Gone (34 page)

She doesn’t even know me
, he’d said so long ago.
She doesn’t know who I am. It’s not my house. It’s not even my life
.

The dried-flower arrangement in a large basket on the kitchen table, the tall faux-gold candlesticks meant to look like they’d come from an Italian villa—it
isn’t
his life. Not then, and certainly not anymore.

“What is it you want from me? What
else
?”

I have to know this, anyway. “My mother. She said she saw the two of you in that restaurant. The day before he went missing.”

Mary is back in the family room again. She is smiling, nodding her head, pleased. It’s the kind of bitter pleasure you get when you realize you’ve been right all along. “He didn’t tell you about it himself.” She sits down in the matching leather lounge chair across from me. She stares at me with her blue eyes. Pretty blue eyes, I notice. Lovely, really. Ian said that he had fallen in love with her because he’d been especially lonely at that time in his life. She was social and vibrant, Catholic like his mother, a virgin. But he might have fallen in love with those eyes, too.

“No. He didn’t tell me.”

“Well, isn’t that rich.”

I trace the threads on the leg of my jeans with my fingernail. Up, down, in a small square of the tight, intricate weave. The regret and the guilt and the anger all merge into shame.

“Wait,” she says.

I look up. The dog has curled up on her bed, and now she watches the proceedings as if they’re a salacious but slightly tedious episode of some real-life courtroom trial on television. Mary had loved those shows, I remember. It was one of Ian’s complaints, the way she spent her days. He judged. He still judges.

“I get it now. I get why you’re here. You don’t just think I have information. You think I’m the
reason
he left.” She is laughing. “Ian! Come downstairs!” she calls. “Let’s break the news to her!” Her voice rises with sarcasm. She tosses her head in disgust. On her bed, Sophie scratches vigorously with one small hind leg. “This is too much, you know that? We met because I
asked
to meet. I didn’t want him to hear it from the girls. It seemed only right that it should come from me. You two didn’t give me that courtesy.”

She holds up her left hand to show me the ring.

“Ken and I are getting married.”

I’m shocked. This is a complete surprise. Somehow I thought we’d sit in our triangle for the rest of our lives—Mary wanting Ian, me wanting Ian, Ian in some state of perpetual indecision no matter what roof he was under. I thought the story would go on forever.

“I wanted to tell him personally. Don’t you think that’s the respectful thing to do? We were married for seventeen years. We have children.”

“Yes.”

“
Ken
is a good man.”

“I’m glad.” I mean that. I
am
glad. But had
this
contributed to
Ian’s disappearance? Maybe he’d been destroyed by the news. First Nathan’s offer, and then Mary’s terrible announcement? I’d always had the feeling that Ian thought of Mary as his backup plan. She was there in his old house, patiently waiting for the moment when he’d had enough. She’d open the door and welcome him home with his favorite meal on the table.

She answers the question I haven’t asked. “He wasn’t bothered in the least. I don’t know what I was expecting—maybe a slight show of emotion? It was like sitting with a stranger, and I’ve known him since I was eighteen. He seemed relieved. For so many years, in the beginning, anyway, he’d acted so jealous, he couldn’t stand it if anyone even looked in my direction, and now he couldn’t care less. I’m getting
married
and, big deal, so what.”

Jealous?
Mary at those parties, playing with Mark’s tie, flirting with Neal and the other men—Ian hadn’t appeared to be bothered at all. He hadn’t even flinched. It never occurred to me that he’d been jealous with her, too. It had never even crossed my mind.

“He said he was happy for me. And you know what? I think he was.”

I hear the rumble of a garage door going up. “That’s Ken now,” she says. “He comes home every day at lunch to see me.”

Ken barrels through the garage door, carrying bags. “Sweetie pie!” he calls. “I’m home!” He’s a big man, with hair combed over his head and a stomach that presses out like a basketball against his buttoned shirt. I know things about him, too, even though we’ve never met, things dropped into the conversation by Bethy or Kristen. He has season tickets to the Husky games. His own son has a drug problem. He loves hot wings and blue cheese dressing. He once thought he was having a coronary and went to the emergency room, only to find out that it was an anxiety attack.

I saw a picture of him once. He was on a boat with Bethy, on a trip they’d taken to Lake Chelan. His bathing suit has a blue Hawaiian print.

He takes the six-pack of beer from the bag and sets it down on the kitchen table before he notices me. Ian bought that kitchen table. And those bar stools. And that Sub Zero refrigerator.

“Ah! Hello there! Three for lunch?” Ken says jovially. Mary was right. Sophie is jumping on Ken like he’s a soldier returning home unharmed from the war, and he picks her up and nuzzles her. The joy-filled reunion is a mutual affair.

“This is Ian’s
wife
,” Mary says.

Ken freezes dramatically, for effect. He’s acting out the stage direction that says,
Ken freezes in his tracks
. He sets Sophie back down; she continues to jump around, wondering where the love has gone. “Well, damn. I need one of these, then.” You can tell by the hard, round ball of his stomach that any excuse will do. How lucky that I’ve provided such a solid one. He twists the cap of one of the beers, takes a swig. “Damn.”

“I had to tell her that we don’t have Ian hidden in the bedroom.”

“For the record, that guy’s not going near our bedroom. If he’s not dead in a ditch somewhere, then he’s a sick bastard to let his daughters worry like this.”

In my head, the teams are changing fast. Ian is still mine to defend. “We don’t know what’s happened. Anything could’ve—”

Mary interrupts me. “ ‘Anything’? I don’t believe ‘anything.’ He wouldn’t have had some accident. That would involve making a mistake, and Ian doesn’t make mistakes, in his view.” She takes one of the beers and hands it to Ken. He twists off the cap for her and hands it back. “All I know is, they’re going to have a lot of questions for the person who saw him last.”

I know what she’s implying. They’ve all obviously had their
little powwows. I’m done here, in this place that’s no longer Ian’s. I get up. I reach for my purse.

“I hope he comes back, really I do. For my daughters’ sake. But I have to tell you something.” She points her finger at me in case I’m confused about who’s being addressed. “You’ve looked at me with pity? Don’t. You did me a favor. Here’s one reason, right here.” I think she means Ken. I’m expecting her to wrap her arms around his big tight belly, but instead she flicks the handle of that pan in the sink. “I can keep this pan in this sink for however long I like and it’s not saying anything about the kind of person I am. See this?” She plucks her shirt again. “He hated me in purple.”

“Purple brings out your eyes,” Ken, ever the ass kisser, says.

Mary ignores him. “Freedom,” she says.

I’m silent. I think it for the millionth time, I do: I admire her courage.

“I’ll show you out.”

I can hear Ken in the kitchen, crooning lovey-dog talk to Sophie. I’ve forgotten something. I reach into my purse. “I’m sorry. But …” I hold the cuff link in my palm. It’s a question.

“He still has those?” she asks.

“From you?”

“From
me
? I hope I have better taste than that. They were from his
father
. Given on Ian’s eighteenth birthday. Paul had a pair just like them.
Congratulations, you’re a man like me
. What, is he wearing them now? He never wore them when the guy was alive.”

His father
—this
was why they were so important?

“The great Paul Hartley Keller,” Mary says.

Mary opens the door for me. We look at each other for a moment. She glances down at my hands. One holds the cuff link, and the other has the frantic lines of ink from my uncapped pen.
There’s so much to say. I want to pour out my regrets and apologies for the pain I’ve caused her. I open my mouth to speak, but she gets there before me.

“All this time, I thought you were so powerful,” she says.

She closes the door on me and my unfinished business. Through the porch window, I see her figure disappear into the kitchen to join Ken and Sophie. Some things are too big for naïve, tidy apologies.

And then, as I hunt for my keys and get in my car, I think of something I haven’t thought about in years. That time when we went for drinks after that concert, Mark and me and Ian and Mary and those other two couples. Mary had been laughing and telling that story about how she’d damaged their car.
You’re careless
, Ian had said to her, and I’d felt embarrassed for her, and guilty. It was cruel of him.

I had thought it was who he was inside an unhappy marriage. But it was who he was, period.

I remember something Dr. Shana Berg once told me, that a person generally brings their same self wherever they go. They bring that self to their coworkers and neighbors and to the man who works at the bank and to the guy in front of them who is still sitting at the light when it turns green. They bring that self to every girlfriend and every pet and every wife.

I unlock my car door and toss my purse to the passenger seat. It still has that damn cuff link inside. All at once, I am overwhelmed with sorrow—for Mary, for me, for our children. But maybe most of all for Ian himself. Maybe there was nowhere, no home, this one or ours, where he could be at peace.

I am overwhelmed with sorrow, but I am also something else. Something terrifying.

I am out of options.

15

Old Blue is droning and clunking. The poor baby is critically ill. I feel the dire urgency to get home. Beyond
urgency
—it’s a clawing, scratching imperative. It’s thunderous buffalo hooves charging over barren land, a rabbit fleeing from a cougar.

It’s the heat. Or else I’m having a heart attack. What are the signs? I’ve read them over and over again in women’s magazines. Shortness of breath? Something about pain down the arm, sharp pain, and, yes, I’ve got that, too. Pain down the arm, pain down both arms, pain radiating from my heart like a sunburst. My palms are sweating. The coffee I drank that morning tumbles and lurches in my stomach.

There’s barely any traffic on the bridge, and so I drive as fast as my car allows. Blue Beast seems to be shivering, but I press down on the accelerator, passing a careful driver going the speed limit. The driver is a woman with swooped-up hair and glasses, and she shoots me a look of disapproval. She probably hates people who talk in the library, too, but so do I. People who drive like this—the teen boys who whip wildly around cars, making narrow cutoffs, the ones you see only a vehicle ahead of you at the stop sign at the overpass turnoff—got my mental lectures, too.
See?
I’d say to them.
Lotta good that did you, and you could have killed someone
. I’d have given them the look she gave me. She and I—we’re about the same age. Whatever she’s doing—heading home, going to work, seeing a friend in the city—it’s not what I am doing, driving while having a heart attack, fighting some urge to turn fast into the wall of the tunnel I’m passing through. Right now I would choose her life over mine. Door number two, whatever’s behind it. I’d take her hated job or her lawsuit or the little bump she’d found in her breast that’s worrying her.

I should drive to the nearest emergency room
, I think. I’d ditch my car in front and run in and they would put me in a blue cotton gown that tied in the back and smelled like bleach, and they’d cover me with a heated blanket that smelled like bleach, too, that certain hospital bleach, the smell I remembered from Abby being born. The automatic doors I’d walk through would shut and no one could get in to find me. Stern nurses and doctors wearing scrubs and those shower caps for shoes would make sure to keep everyone out of my room. I want a needle in my arm. The cool sheets, the bliss of rest.

Dani, Danielle! You’re fine. You’re fine! You’re okay
. My inner … who? Mother, God, nurse? She tries to sound soothing.
This falling-apart stuff is no good. It won’t help anything. Get it together
, she says.

I don’t know what I’ve done
, I confess to her.
I think I’ve done something horrible
.

That cogent thought, the first admitted one, brings everything rushing up—remorse and Mary and grief and Ian and fear—and I make it through that tunnel and pull off to the side of the road. It occurs to me that people often get hit when they get out of their cars on the freeway to change a tire or investigate an accident. I picture the impact, my body flying, but there are few cars, and this is not what threatens me most.

I heave. I throw up only the morning coffee and fear. The body doesn’t know what to do with terror. This is all it can do, and it is certainly not enough.

The Blue Beast makes it home. It sighs with relief when I finally put it into park in its gravel spot. Oh, it is so weary. But I don’t sigh with relief. The terror, which is some sort of hunched beast in a dark coat inside my own body, gets down on its haunches. Alarm shoves it aside, sleek and fast, like one of those thin, skeletal dogs I don’t like, with the tightly stretched skin and the heads that look like skulls found in a desert. The alarm is there because I see a tow truck on our street. Ian’s car is hovering midair, set on a red sci-fi Transformer arm—a comical look under other circumstances, one that brings to mind mechanical creatures invading innocent cities. Ian would die seeing it manhandled like that. It seems unnatural, the way its vulnerable underside is exposed. The sight of it is devastating. The fact of the matter is this: Any image of Ian on a beach somewhere is shattered right now as that car is being readied to be taken away.