He's Gone (39 page)

I open a desk drawer. I take out a lined yellow pad. Ian keeps a stack of them in there. I rethink this. I take out several more. A pen, too.

I do not know how to do this officially. Nathan has warned against it, and so has Dr. Shana Berg, but there are things I don’t know and things that I fear, and these facts should be handed over. There are those who have too much guilt and those who don’t have enough, perhaps. Still, I will tell what’s happened as best as I can and let others judge for themselves. It’s the right thing to do. At the end of the day, the truth—your wrongdoings, your good intentions, your human struggles, what you’ve done and why—is the place you go on from.

It is the whole story.

No, it is a confession.

It is everything I know I am guilty of in this story of Ian and me. All the sins I can and can’t remember, all I am heartily sorry for.

I take up my pen. I write:

I used to imagine it sometimes, what would happen if one day I didn’t come home. Not that I ever considered running off—I could never actually do that, even if I occasionally had that fantasy of driving south and checking in to some hotel. Some place with bathrobes, for sure
.

I write, and write, and the yellow pages fill up, and sometime in the night the thunder rolls in the distance and comes closer and closer until it sounds like it is sitting next to me. It is the dark, hunched man, standing and roaring in my ears, his fist by my face, his hand over my mouth.

It is morning, and my fingers are aching. They are cramped and contorted. There is something else I’m supposed to do. I’m supposed to sign my name, aren’t I, to a confession? And so I do.

Dani Ross Hastings Keller

Seattle, Washington

18

Here is what happens next: It stops raining. The hard, driving rain that began after the thunder rolled through has now passed, part and parcel of a Seattle spring. It’s a dewy morning, a beautiful one. A day for pardon and peace and absolution. I see that the rain has stopped but that the sun is flashing between dramatic, fast-moving clouds. I take a long shower. I get dressed. My mother is having coffee, and Abby is reading her mail on her laptop at the kitchen table. I am doing something mundane again: I am looking for a bag in which to carry those pages. I see Abby’s beloved head, tipped down in concentration. I love that head so much, and that hair, and every little bit of that girl, that young woman. It tears my heart, seeing her, loving her like that. It tears my heart to see my mother in her favorite sweat clothes, her white hair in disarray from sleep. And my sweet old Pollux, oh, yes, him, too. Beloved him. Beloveds, all of them.

Double hugs
, I say silently.

I could cry, and so I get myself out of there. I take a bag from the narrow space on the side of the fridge, where we keep them. I go to my room and slide the stack of pages into the bag. There is my wrinkle cream that really does nothing for wrinkles, and
my glass-beaded bedside lamp that I love, and my reading glasses. I am in the middle of a book, and my bookmark is still set between the same pages where I’d left off days ago. A life ago. Everything is feeling bittersweet, and so I need to get out of there fast, before I change my mind.

“What are you doing?” my mother asks. I am getting a jacket from the hall closet; who knows what the weather will be.

“Out” is all I can manage to say.

“Dani …” She knows; she always does. Abby says the same thing about me. Mother’s intuition. Say what you will, but I believe in it. “What are you doing?” My mother’s voice is rising in alarm. Abby looks up, questioning.

“Out,” I say again. I try to keep my voice steady.

My head is deep in the closet in the hall now. The jacket I want has slipped off its hanger and fallen on the floor behind the rain boots and other shoes. When I get up, my mother is there, staring at me hard. She grabs my arm.

“Dani, if you are thinking of doing anything foolish …” She keeps her voice low.

I say nothing. I am trying to hold it together.

“I’m begging you.”

And then, can it be? That damn boat. That goddamn boat. The hard rain and the waves have loosened the rope again. I am aware that this is where we began, that morning when he disappeared. It makes me understand that this is some kind of ending. It’s silly, maybe, but I want to take care of a problem for them, for my mother and Abby, one I can fix. Before I go, I want to tighten that cleat. It will be one less thing they will have to deal with.

I get that toolbox from the closet. It’s the one Mary gave Ian when they were married. I undo the clasps and lift the lid. The tools are lying in their molded plastic places, but the screwdriver is gone. It’s odd. I have not used anything in this box since I hung
pictures when we moved in, and Ian, as particular as he is, would have always, always returned it to its proper place.

Still, no matter. I can’t concern myself with that now. There’s no time. I get a knife from the kitchen drawer. I open the doors to the deck and Pollux trots after me.

“Dani, don’t worry about it,” my mother says.

“That banging is driving me crazy,” Abby says. She needs me still. That’s what threatens to choke me up. My mother, too. No—truth is, we all need one another.

I kneel on the dock. If someone sees me here, it might look as if I am praying. I fit the tip of the knife into the screw and twist hard. I try to jiggle the cleat, but it feels firm. I wind the rope back over it so the boat is snug once again against the dock.

I get up. It’s silly, maybe. But in my heart, I say goodbye.

The stacks of notepads are in the bag, and I am holding them under my arm as I leave. My mother is standing in the doorway. She is pleading with me with her eyes, so I don’t look. I don’t want anything to dissuade me. I am hoping Detective Jackson will be there in his office when I need him. My mother doesn’t know what’s in that bag, but she knows it’s bad. If she did know, she’d likely be throwing herself down in front of me, blocking my exit. Isabel Eleanor Ross would let this happen only over her dead body.

I hear a noise out there. Oh, really, can it be? Old Joseph Grayson is playing with his electric boat?
Now?
I listen. Yes, there’s the unmistakable whine as he zips it over the waves. Why not, though? The sky is all morning purples and pinks when the sun comes out behind speeding clouds. The water is choppy—perfect, maybe, for a post-toke hydroplane race with your ancient hippie self.

At the end of the dock, in the parking lot finally, I unlock my car door. I set the notepads on the seat beside me. The package is almost another passenger; it seems as weighty.

I am trying to hurry. If I don’t get out of here soon, I may change my mind. I turn the key.
Please
, I beg. The terrible humming sound starts, and I put my car in reverse.

And that is when there is a horrendous clunk. I put the damn thing in neutral and in reverse again, and again, and again, but the old Blue Beast will not move. Blue is finished. No matter how much I want this, I am not going backward.

I put my head in my hands. I want to cry, but there’s no time for that. I need to solve this problem, quick. I will go inside and ask to use my mother’s car. It’s terrible, yes, to return there after that particular leaving, but I have no choice.

Nothing is easy
, I think,
not even this
. I am sure it’s the worst kind of bad luck, some cruel trick of timing. What are the odds that the car dies
now
? Yet this is how it goes, one thing happens and then another, a piece follows a piece, things continue to break, as fate conspires, insisting on telling its own story, which (hopefully, finally) you are able to hear.

I get out. I am holding the bag in my arms like a baby, like my own child. And that’s when someone begins to shout. A single shout at first, old Joseph Grayson, and he is screaming. He is yelling,
Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!
He’s
shrieking
. He’s having a heart attack, I think. That’s my first thought, anyway. He is screaming like a girl who’s seen a snake. No, worse. Way worse.

There’s some kind of commotion going on. A door opening and slamming, and now my mother screams. My mother? I know that voice. Dear God, what? They are being attacked; are they being
attacked
?

No. Because now comes the
thud, thud, thud
of shoes running on the hard dock. And Pollux is barking and barking, and Abby
is calling my name. She is running down the dock. She has her goofy Toucan Sam shirt on and a pair of cotton plaid shorts and her hair is wild, and she is shouting to me. Old Joseph Grayson is just behind her. Him, with his bushy gray beard and long hair in a ponytail and that tie-dyed Grateful Dead shirt he perpetually wears. My mother—she’s trying to run, too. She’s back there, running as best as she can.

I am still clutching that bag when Abby reaches me.

“Mom!” She is crying.

And there is old Joseph Grayson, out of breath. He is holding that stupid electric boat. And he is holding one wet and expensive Italian shoe.

19

After the divers arrive to release Ian’s body from where he’s been tangled in the anchor rope of the
New View
, after the autopsy and the funeral, I stop dreaming of Kerry Park. Instead, I dream the simple, horrible story of that night, told by the singular rope markings on one of his legs and by the screwdriver found on the murky lake floor just below him. He is trying to fix that damn cleat, the drifting boat. It is late, and his mind is so burdened, and he is more than a little drunk. He reaches for the line and loses his footing; he slips, one small misstep, into the lake. One leg is free and one leg is bound, but more critically, he is caught, and he struggles, but the struggle is too much for him. I dream of him underwater, and, most of all, I dream of trying to rescue him.

I toss and turn with a new set of questions. How can it be that no one heard him that night? Hadn’t there been a splash, a cry for help? Had the party boat that Maggie Long heard masked the noise? Would I have heard him if I hadn’t taken those pills? I do some midnight reading on my returned laptop. I find out that drowning doesn’t look the way most people suspect. There is very little splashing or waving and no yelling or calls of any kind. Drowning is quiet and undramatic. Sufferers are unable to
yell, using the little air they have left to breathe. People can watch an individual drown—neighbors, friends, loved ones can look right at it with their own eyes—and not even know it’s happening.

He had to rescue himself but couldn’t. I had to rescue myself but never did.

Months later, my mother is still angry with the police. She has called me from her house. I can hear the television. There is a scraping sound, too, as if she is buttering toast.

“I don’t understand why they didn’t bring a diver out in the first place.” We’ve had this discussion a million times by now.

“There was no reason to think he drowned. There was a ladder right there, inches from him.”

“Still! Accidents happen. A foot gets caught … It was late, he’d been drinking …”

“Mom. What did they tell us? There’ve only been two drownings in that lake in twelve years.”

“Three now. You could have been arrested!”

“It wasn’t clear what happened that night, not at all. Not even to me. Especially not to me.”

“Bethy was gunning for you.”

We haven’t spoken since the funeral, his children and I. Sometimes I wish I had that sweater back.

My mother is crunching, eating in my ear. It sounds like dinosaurs walking the earth. “I shudder to think what would have happened, I do, if that old fool had not lost his boat under your dock.”

“I think he’s your type, Ma.”

“Oh, yeah, baby.
Lately it occurs to me, What a long … strange trip it’s been
,” she wails. She goes in for a solo guitar riff.

“I’m assuming that’s the Grateful Dead.” My mother knows her hippie music.

“You would be right.”

“Summer of Love.”

“Dani?” There is no more scraping or chewing now.

“Hmm?”

“I’m sorry I was such a bitch about him.”

Ian, she means. Not old, stoned Joseph Grayson, who is innocent in all this. “You were trying to tell me something important.”

“I get carried away.”

“Yeah, you do.”

“They still should have checked the lake.”

I don’t blame the police for not suspecting that Ian had drowned, but I don’t tell her this. I wouldn’t have thought he fell in that lake in a million years. A misstep like that—it’d be so
human
.

Ian never made mistakes. Except for the ones that destroyed him.

I have decided to stay in the houseboat. I am alone for the first time in my life, although this sounds unfair to Pollux. He lives there with me, old pal that he is. I met Mark when I was nineteen years old, as I’ve said. And then there was Ian.

At first I thought I’d have to move. How could I live there, thinking about him under the water like that all that time? He’d been right there, with that other cuff link still affixed to his shirtsleeve. And with—
don’t think it don’t think it don’t think it
—that bust of him I had thrown into the lake. I hadn’t even known he was there. I hadn’t felt it. It seemed like a failure of my love for him. One of many failures.

But then I remembered Ian saying,
I never want to live anywhere else. I could die here and be happy
. Maybe it sounds strange, but that’s weirdly comforting. I never got to say goodbye, and this is the last place he was and the rightest place for me to grieve him, grieve us. I could run from here, but there are things I need to look hard at—my own guilt, but, maybe even more, the places where I’ve been merely human, too.

And I want to remember, I want to keep hold of the good parts, the love, yes, within the complicated whole. Those road trips we took, with the music playing and the windows rolled down. Those heady days before the hard ones, and the hard ones when we struggled toward each other. Those times, God, passionate times, when a look into each other’s eyes felt like a long drink of summer.