Matters of Faith (27 page)

Cal could stand separation. He'd been alone when I met him. But I had still had my parents, I'd had a boyfriend, I'd had a large circle of friends, a larger circle of acquaintances, and larger still, the very world open to me.

Everything had gotten smaller. I had broken up with the boyfriend to be with Cal, lost my parents, slowly lost touch with all of my friends, and with the birth of my children, the very thing that I thought would open up worlds to me, I had given up my vast possibilities in this one.

And it continued to shrink. Marshall left for school and was now so clearly beyond the son I thought I knew; Cal had moved away from me and I didn't know what his world was like anymore; and my daughter, the one I'd thought I had so much more time with, the one I thought I would always have, had gone somewhere I could not follow. My world had shrunk, constricted around me, to this hospital room.

When I was pregnant with Meghan, I hadn't had a baby shower. Gifts had always embarrassed me; I hadn't even wanted a baby shower when I was pregnant with Marshall. I hadn't wanted a bridal shower when we got married, and I hadn't had a birthday party since I was seven and ran from the room, sobbing, when confronted with a great mountain of brightly wrapped presents and the expectant faces of my classmates.

But I had always been touched by the little gifts Cal occasionally surprised me with. When we brought Meghan home from the hospital, this exact same hospital, he had scattered small bits of love throughout the house, for me to discover in time, without fanfare.

The first time I reached for a onesie, my hand fell upon a small ceramic plaque, the sort of hokey little tchotchke that I usually couldn't stand. It had a fat silk rope to hang it on a wall, and in brilliant pink calligraphy it said,
A son is a son till he takes a wife, but a daughter's a daughter for the rest of her life
. Little garlands of white flowers surrounded the words, and this new part of me, the mother of a daughter part of me, did not laugh out loud at the sentiment of it.

Instead I found a hook, and hung it on the wall above her changing table, and then kissed Cal when he came home that day and whispered “thank you” softly in his ear. We had become a family when Marshall was born, but we were complete when Meghan came along, and I'd never even realized that there was an absence to begin with.

Now I knew more about the absences in our lives than I did about what we had. And we had a new one: the absence of easy apologies. They had never been hard before. Once,
sorry
had rolled off our tongues as easily as Cal caught fish. I should have said I was sorry that I didn't tell him what the detectives had told me. But it simply felt like more effort than I could muster.

He finally dropped into the recliner and dug in his duffel bag. “I wasn't going to show you this, but I guess you better know in case anyone tries to get in here,” he said, pulling out a newspaper folded in half.

“I went by their office—those detectives you said you wouldn't talk to—this morning to see if there was anything we could do about it,” he said, handing it to me. “I looked like a real ass when they mentioned the long conversation they'd had with my wife.”

I scanned the section he'd given me quickly, unsure of what I was looking for, then gasped when I saw it, the headline I hadn't even considered could be about us.

“Girl near death, brother disappears,” I whispered, reading the accompanying article quickly, then going back to read it word for word. Cal talked in the background but I barely heard him.

“Kevin told me a reporter had been by the marina to talk to me, and I imagine they went by the house too. All I can figure is that someone from the hospital called them, that doctor, I guess. The detectives said a journalist called and asked about Marshall, but they didn't give out any information except to ask if the journalist had talked to Marshall. I guess that's how they figured out he's gone.”

The article was brief, but damning, and seeing it in black type, with our names attached to this outlandish story, made me ill. I rushed to the bathroom and fell on my knees in front of the toilet, but all I could do was try to catch my breath. The nausea stayed, hovering somewhere just under my lungs, making every breath a risk.

Dr. Kimball hadn't been mentioned by name in the article, but who else would have been so callous about a family's personal crisis, our family's personal crisis in particular?

I sat back on the tiles and leaned against the wall, cool against my shoulder blades, and stared dully at the toilet, the white ceramic sculpture, and thought of the oddest things. I wondered if I would have to teach Meghan to use one again someday, or if we would ever even get to that point. I remembered how easy she had been to potty train, especially after the difficulty I'd gone through with Marshall.

I remembered how Cal had delighted in allowing him to pee off the side of the boat, how the first time he did it, a fish jumped and startled Marshall so that he fell in the water. How Cal roared with laughter as he hauled him out and how Marshall had trembled on the edge of sobbing and laughing, finally coming down on the side of hysterical laughter with his father.

Such a simple thing, a toilet. So bitterly stupid to sit there and make it a poignant symbol of a possible future. But it did represent a line between infancy and independence, between the drudgery of diapers and freedom. I turned my cheek to the cool wall, my ear pressed tightly to it, and could hear Cal moving things about, muffled thumps and mutterings.

I took a deep breath and slid up the wall, not bothering to wash my face clean of tears. I used to be careful of the ravages of crying, stress, illness, and daily indifference. Even if my use of makeup had declined over the years, probably just when it ought to have increased, I was still conscious of how I looked to my husband.

I still brushed my teeth first thing in the morning, I still washed my face, showered, and used deodorant daily, still paid attention to how shabby I would let my clothes get. I still shaved my legs, under my arms, carefully tamed anything that got unruly in a bathing suit. I had not, at any point, let myself go to hell.

But frankly, I simply did not care anymore. I paused to remember if I had showered that day. I hadn't. God only knew how long it had been since I shaved my legs. I wouldn't even consider raising an arm for a look there, much less a whiff, and the thought of applying a razor anywhere else was nearly laughable. I felt a vague satisfaction at the knowledge that I had, indeed, brushed my teeth that morning, as if that proved my descent had its limits. For now.

Cal looked tired, but other than that it seemed that men, in addition to their unfair aging advantage, weathered stress better. Perhaps it was simply a matter of the amount of upkeep necessary to keep women presentable. Men looked good with stubble, a little scruffy around the edges. A little scruffy around the edges for women meant disaster.

I jerked at the soft knock on the door.

“Chloe? You okay?” Cal called.

“Fine,” I called back, and turned on the faucet as if to prove that, clearly, if I was able to work a sink, I must be all right. Perversely, I did not allow my hands to touch the water, and refused to ruminate about what this might signify.

When I returned to the room, I saw with surprise that Cal had rearranged the chairs. He had dragged them over to the windows and opened the blinds. That light wasn't going to do much to improve my countenance. It splashed through the room, as loud and harsh as heavy metal, and I immediately went to Meghan's bedside, to shield her from this intrusion.

“What are you doing?” I asked. I couldn't keep my voice from rising accusingly. I had always tried to keep that shrillness I so often heard in other women's voices from invading mine. I hated hearing women speak to their husbands as if they were dull children they barely tolerated.

But right now, Cal
was
very much like a dull child I could barely tolerate.

But the mirror-bright bars of light that fell across Meghan didn't extend up to her face, and there was little I could say to support my irritation. I adjusted her sheets, straightened a couple of wires across her pillow, smoothed her hair back from her forehead. High-pitched beeps made me whirl around to check the digital displays on the machines that were keeping track of her vital signs, her “very promising” brain activity. The beeps weren't coming from any of the machines, and I finally turned Cal's way.

He was working both of our cell phones, his flipped open on the little table between the chairs, mine in his large hand, pushing the tiny buttons as dexterously as any fifteen-year-old. One of Meghan's spiral notebooks was open on the table, and he was making notes from whatever he was finding on my phone.

“What are you doing?” I asked again, my voice just as shrill as before. I pulled the phone from his hand and he just as quickly grabbed it back, catching my wrist in his other hand, hurting me, though I knew he couldn't have meant to. I had nothing to hide from him, but he had never been one of those husbands who felt a right to go through my things whenever he felt like it. We'd always been polite. All of the common courtesy levees that made our relationship work were being breached.

“Sit down,” he commanded, pointing my phone toward the chair across from him.

I sat.

He leaned forward and flipped my phone closed before he looked at me intently. He just looked for a moment, and I wanted to say “What are you doing” again, but I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of it. Instead, I remained silent and gazed back at him, hopeful that I appeared calm and unperturbed on the outside. Inside, my heart was beating hard, and I still felt nauseous. I felt as if I were sitting across from my father, a feeling that infuriated me. I'd found that the only way to combat it was to act as much like an adult as I could muster.

“Where is he?” Cal said.

I looked down at my phone and at his scribbled notes, buying a little time to figure out exactly what he wanted. I assumed he meant Marshall, but I wanted us on even footing in this conversation, and I wouldn't be rushed into making a misstep. But Cal wasn't waiting for me to catch up.

“Where the hell is Marshall, Chloe? You can't protect him like this. You're going to make it much worse than it already is.”

“I don't know where he is,” I said. His expression didn't change. He didn't believe me.

“Dammit, Chloe, I can't believe you can be so stupid—”

“Whoa, you can stop right there,” I interrupted him. “Don't you dare ever say that I'm stupid. I don't know where he is. I have no idea. He didn't tell me, he hasn't called, and he's had his phone turned off for days. All I know is that he bailed Ada out and they took off. That's all I know. I'm not covering for him, I'm not aiding and abetting, and I'm not about to let you make me feel guilty about something I didn't do.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose, right where he'd developed tiny indentations from the sunglasses he had to wear constantly. His face looked vulnerable without them, the way faces do when people first get laser eye surgery and forget they don't have to squint to focus. Cal squinted whenever he was without his sunglasses, even when it was dark out, and it had emphasized the lines radiating from the corners of his eyes.

Now he looked at me through his fingers, squinting as though I were a mile away, across sunlit water, trying to decipher who I was, what I was, and whether it was worth getting closer for a more intimate look.

“I don't know where he is,” I stated, slowly, carefully forming each word for him so there was no mistake.

“You really don't?” he asked, softly now.

“I really don't.”

He sighed heavily and leaned back in his chair, his hand now covering his eyes. “All right. Well, I think we need to do everything we can to find him. Call his friends... does he still have friends?”

I shook my head and shrugged. “I don't know.”

“Well, do what you can. I've been onto the cell phone website. He hasn't made any calls in the last week. I thought—” He waved my cell phone in the air before leaning forward and dropping it onto the table. “—maybe you were calling him.”

“I am calling him,” I said. “I'm not getting any answer, but I've been leaving messages for days now. I've told you that.”

“I think,” he said, pushing the newspaper with his toe, “that we need to make a concentrated effort to find him before this girl manages to really screw up his entire life.”

I loved him right then. I loved him so much for the relief that coursed through me, and I felt like crying, loose-limbed and light-headed with the release of it. Suddenly, I was not alone, we were a team again, and I wanted to curl up in his lap and wrap my arms around his neck and let him tell me how he was going to fix this.

“So what's your plan?”

“First we have to manage this somehow,” he said, tilting his head toward the newspaper. “There was a message at home from a reporter. I don't think we should talk to them at all. What do you think?”

I shook my head. “No. No, I don't want any part of it. What are they going to want to do? Come in here and take pictures of her? Splash the grieving parents all over the front page? No.”

He nodded. “Okay, then I think we'd better talk to someone here about their policy on who they let in.”

“Sandy just walked right up to the door the other day.”

“Exactly. So, we'll do that, we'll keep trying to find Marshall...” He trailed off and sighed, leaning his head back and staring at the ceiling for a moment, and I finally moved. I crossed the small space between us that had seemed like such a distance before, and climbed into his lap.