He's Gone (35 page)

My mother is standing on the street, watching it, and the guy who checks groceries at Pete’s is watching her, because she’s yelling. One hand is on her hip, and the other is waving around. She’s wearing an innocent little pair of capris and a white T-shirt, and she looks pretty stylish considering that she’s losing her mind.

I’m in no shape to do damage control, but she leaves me no choice. Her face is red. “I don’t know what you people are doing! Nothing happened to him in that fucking car! Try actually looking for the man, how about that, you goddamn useless idiots!”

She has a mouth and she knows how to use it
, I think inanely, but
I am praying she’ll shut it. She can only do more and more harm. I run toward her.

“Stop that!” I say. The man operating the tow truck ignores her. I don’t understand the procedure here. Is he a cop, too, or is he a tow-truck guy who has a police-department gig on the side? How does it work exactly?

“Dani.” My mother is out of breath. Her eyes look wild. Maybe she’s the one having the heart attack. Maybe the psychic was right after all.

“Stop that,” I snap at her. “Stop yelling! This will do no good.”

“Other people were here before, taking pictures of the car. Looking through it. Putting stuff in plastic bags. Then this guy came …”

Other people
—she doesn’t say
police
.

“What do they think?” she says, but we both know. We know what we’re afraid of.

The tow-truck driver gets out now. He leaves the door open. He heads toward us. He’s bald, and he has glasses, large ones that were in style in the 1980s. He has the start of a gray beard, or else he just hasn’t shaved. His shirt is blue, the kind prisoners wear. The word
denim
escapes me. He carries a clipboard over to where we stand.

“Don’t sign anything,” my mother says.

These are the things she knows.
Don’t sign anything you haven’t read. Get a receipt. Don’t give out your credit-card number over the phone. Better yet, don’t use a credit card unless it’s for emergencies. Credit is a fast road to ruin
.

I sign where he indicates. He looks at me. I know what he’s thinking. He’s gauging my capacity for wrongdoing. He’s staring at my face, wondering what I’ve done and how I’ve done it.

But I might be mistaken about that. “You have …”: he says.
He raises his hand to his own cheek, brushing something off. I put my hand to my cheek, where he’s indicated. Vomit.

“You people,” my mother sneers.

“Stop,” I say. “He’s only doing his job.”

He smiles. He actually smiles. He tucks his clipboard under his arm. “All righty.”

“Thank you,” I say. Dear, dear God, why did I say that? Why, why, why? It’s a habit, a terrible habit. Here it is again, what I’ve done for years, madly flinging politeness and compliments at people, the way you throw steaks to a lion. When I’ve been in danger, I’ve done it, and when I haven’t been in danger, I’ve done it, too, because how can we ever be sure which is which? Yes, a person generally brings their same self to any circumstance, to tow-truck drivers and furnace repairmen, to snarling, vicious dogs who do not see the innocence of your pizza box. To husbands.

The car disappears down the street on that truck. It’s like I’m watching Ian leave. My heart is squeezing and squeezing. I miss him so much I want to fall on my knees. My heart is cracking open. I want to cry out to him to come back. To please, please come back.

He’s not coming back. Maybe I do know this after all.
Goodbye
, I say to him in my head. I say it tenderly. I try to tell him with that one word how sorry I am.

My mother is already inside the houseboat, and she’s on the phone.

“I’ll hold,” I hear her say.

She looks at me and then away, staring out at the lake instead. Pollux tries to be positive, giving a small leap, but then he smells the betrayal on my pant legs. Some other dog. He sniffs madly, as
if searching my phone for my lover’s number. I caught Ian looking at my phone once. No, here’s the truth: more than once.

I give Pollux a treat to make it up to him. These are the normal things that I still must do, and this continues to astonish me. How can it be so? Give the dog a treat, change my clothes, pee. They are the odd things that don’t belong here right now. I hear Abby on the phone, too. I try to listen in but can’t hear much of anything. I put my old sundress on now, and clothing relief washes over me. Ah, it’s one of the best feelings, clothing relief, when stockings, or too tight jeans, or a shirt that’s new but somehow not you after all, are finally stripped off.

I don’t know what to do.

I don’t have any idea, and I’m not sure I’m in my own body. The panic has turned to numb horror, and I’m moving underwater and trying to breathe underwater. I can hear Abby in the living room. “Thank you very much,” she says. “We would appreciate that. Yes. I’ll send you one right now.”

My mother also finishes her call. “Thank you. We’ll see you then.” We are all so polite and grateful and full of fear.

Abby joins us in the kitchen. My mother is speaking only to her. “He’s in trial now and all day tomorrow, but his secretary promised he’ll get in touch first thing in the morning.”

“Okay.” Abby nods, as if agreeing to a plan. “They’re putting it on the news tonight. KING and KIRO. I’ve got to send them a picture in the next half hour to make the deadline.”

She looks through her phone, punching and scrolling with adept thumbs. “This is good.” She shows the phone to my mother, who nods. Then she shows it to me—a photo of Ian that she took—and I also nod. We’ve all agreed, it seems, on this course of action. Or, rather, they’ve agreed, and I am going along like a timid and newly hired junior partner. The photo was taken a few months ago, when Ian and I and Abby and Jon, a boy she’d
been seeing, went out for the day on the
New View
. It doesn’t look that much like Ian; or, rather, it’s a version of Ian you don’t see too often. His hair is messed from the wind, and he’s wearing a gray sweatshirt. You can tell he’s on a boat. You can see the bow behind him and the blue of the water, and he looks like an outdoorsman, which he isn’t, not really. He’s smiling. He looks relaxed. He looks happy.

I almost step in it, the small puddle in the kitchen. No one has thought to take Pollux out. This is what happens when you don’t pay attention. I get the paper towels.

“Oh, great, Poll. Super,” Abby says.

“Don’t,” I tell her. It isn’t fair—we are the ones who’ve been careless.

Pollux sees the roll of paper towels and lowers his head. His eyes are sad.

“It’s okay,” I say to him. “You didn’t mean to.” I throw away the soggy paper and squirt the floor with Windex. I wash my hands. I go to him and speak into his sweet black neck. “It’s not your fault,” I whisper.

But he has had enough of his own shame and of my forgiveness. I think he’s sick of that whole game. He escapes from my hug and settles down by the glass door, groaning like an old man. He puts his chin on his paws. He stares out at the
New View
and the now choppy waves, and he sighs through his nose.

Of course, it only gets worse and worse: You find your soul mate, you go through hell to be together, but then he doesn’t trust you. And then he pecks away at you with his criticism. And then every day afterward you doubt it’ll last. And then you wonder how you could have gotten this so wrong. You try to hold on to
what made you so crazy for him in the first place. You try very hard to remember what you love.

There are the ways in which you share your life, for one thing.
Share your life
—a phrase like that, it’s such a cliché that the words lose meaning. They’re valentine and love-song words. But if you do hear them, honestly hear them, they’re rather beautiful. To share your life, to have someone beside you who witnesses it—it’s the best kind of beautiful; as good as it gets.

A glass of wine would get poured as we waited for dinner to be finished.

Today, when I was having lunch? I was sitting outside at Salvatore’s. A woman walking this big German shepherd is coming one way, and this mom with a little girl is coming the other. She’s got pink rubber boots on, so she’s clunking along
.

Seattle kid, with a tiara and a tutu
with
the boots?
I asked.

Yeah, but this one is cute. She’s about down here
. Ian held his hand just above his knee.
And the dog is right down there at her level, and she turns to her mom with her arms up in the air and she says, “Hug!” Not “Up,” but “Hug!” Really frantic, like, “Emergency! Hug!”

That is so cute. I love that so much
.

I knew you would
.

Imagine if something that big was looking
you
in the eyes?

With those teeth?

Hug!

I would tell him I noticed the maples changing on Ravenna Avenue, and he would tell me he thought his colleague, Mike Reynolds, had a drinking problem. I’d explain in great detail why the pair of jeans I bought were such a super deal, and he’d tell me about the comedian he heard on the radio on the way to work.

My mother bought a new Bible
, he shouted in my direction one Saturday afternoon as we paddled kayaks on the lake.

Who buys a new Bible?

Maybe it was new and improved
.

His hand would be on my bare hip as rain fell on the roof. His socks would be tumbled with mine when they came out warm from the dryer.

Do you want to try the calamari?
His reading glasses would be down his nose as he studied the menu in the dim light of the restaurant.

I’ve
tried
calamari
.

That’s right. The tentacles
.

Exactly. The little round pieces that don’t have tentacles, fine. But you take your chances. They might put the creepy ones in there
.

Hmm, remember? We talked about that in one of our first phone conversations. Food that looks like the animal you’re eating
.

You told me you couldn’t eat fish if you’d seen their eyes
.

Honestly, I sometimes have to actively ignore chicken wings
.

Let’s get the wild mushrooms
.

You are both silent after you pass the car accident on the highway. You walk through a department store with opulent Christmas decorations and the bell-ringers out front. He points out the full moon. You ask him to pick up razors for you at the store. You bake him a birthday cake, and he runs back to fetch your purse at the restaurant where you forgot it. You share your life.

Sometimes I would see him anew. Do you know this, do you know what I mean? You catch a glimpse of your beloved, and it’s just him you see, not your history or the worries in your own head or the mood of the house in the last weeks, just
him
. His sweet, soft hair. That scar at the bridge of his nose that he got playing sixth-grade flag football. Him being him, in his very own
moment, pouring his own self a glass of grapefruit juice while wearing his T-shirt and jeans. He’s got bare feet. Suddenly, unawares, you’re overcome with tenderness. Your love is like glass, lovely and transparent, fragile, but stronger than you think. You can see the world through it.

When his words pluck you from the air mid-flight, then, and when he pins you and puts the cotton ball of cyanide over your nose: Coming from someone who
shares your life
, it is the worst kind of betrayal.

Ian went to Kristen’s graduation anyway, even though he’d been asked not to come. He hid in the back of the gym so he wouldn’t be seen. He left before the end, when the families descended and flowers were given and pictures taken.

It was like I was stealing something, when they’re
my
children. My own babies
.

He spat those words bitterly and turned away from me. As Ian stomped up the stairs and slammed our bedroom door, I flashed on an image of Mark from when I was still in the hospital after Abby was born. Mark had never been happier. He loved babies. (You wouldn’t have thought it after what I’ve described, would you? But no man, no anyone, is ever just an angry person. They are tender and silly and confused, that’s the problem. No person is ever one thing, angry or unfaithful or critical or guilty or victimized or weak or strong; do you hear what I’m saying?)

In the hospital, I was wearing a new robe Mark had bought me. It was more expensive than we could afford, and it was so plush, with its striped shades of peach and blue. I’d been looking for him, wobbling down the hall while clutching my newly deflated stomach, because he’d left with Abby in her cocoon blanket. He wanted to let me sleep, but I had woken up and was
desperate to see her again. It was as if he’d walked away with my heart or my lungs. I needed her back. Finally, I found him on a green plastic couch in a waiting room. A television was on in the high corner of the ceiling, but he wasn’t watching it. No, he was staring down at Abby’s tiny face and her rosebud lips, as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. He had his pinkie finger in her mouth, and she was sucking on it. I could see how much he loved her.

It felt important to remember that Ian, too, had swaddled his daughters and cradled their small heads and kissed those fat baby cheeks that smelled like apple juice. They once rode on his back and danced on his feet and he took them trick-or-treating, their eyes slightly scared behind their princess masks.

And now they’d made him (and he’d made himself) the jilted lover. He called endlessly. He sent flowers. He begged, and they turned away.

It was too high a price. He said this.
It’s too high a price
.

It was also too late to be doing the math.

I wish you wouldn’t do that
.

Do what?

You were biting your nails. Do you realize you were biting your nails? It’s crass
.

My heart was in his teeth, as he used to say, and he bit down. No matter how much empathy I attempted to deploy, no matter how hard I tried to see the reasons I loved him, late at night I knew the truth. Way before I went to see Mary, long before he disappeared, I knew it. Dr. Shana Berg had even spoken it, but it wasn’t something I wanted to hear back then.