The Vanishing Expert

by David Movsesian

  Everything’s Normal

  There were those who believed that Tom Kendall had planned to marry Gloria Moody from the beginning, that his hiring her nearly three years earlier was more an act of love— some claimed it was lust— than it was charity or pity. The truth was that Tom Kendall never pitied Gloria. It was, as far as he could tell, not in Gloria’s nature to allow herself to be pitied, even when confronted with the bleak prospects of the life that faced her after Edward’s death.

  Tom Kendall was always drawn to Gloria Moody. He’d met her on numerous occasions and he always found himself watching her from across a room, never leering and rarely catching her eye, but always aware of her presence. He remembered her as always seeming to be a bit off balance, teetering somewhere between the life she wanted and the unsatisfying one she was living. In Tom’s opinion, Gloria Moody was made for more than Edward could offer her.

  On one such occasion years earlier, Tom overheard Gloria speaking of her husband, who had earlier excused himself on the pretense of getting a beer and never returned. When someone remarked about Edward’s absence, she overcompensated by extolling her husband’s virtues. It was a habit not unlike Edward’s habit of apologizing for his wife in those years before he disappeared. In truth, they were often apologizing for the other for something.

  “Edward’s my anchor,” Gloria finally said of her husband. She’d meant it as a compliment, but overhearing the remark, Tom Kendall shook his head gravely. In the worst possible way, Tom had thought at the time. He was pulling her down with him. On the day that Edward Moody’s boat was towed ashore, with Edward conspicuously absent, Tom remembered that remark, and uncharitably thought to himself: Isn’t it appropriate that he sank like a stone?

  On those few occasions when Gloria found herself in the company of those wealthy elite that she most admired— and by whom she most hoped to be admired— she seemed to not quite fit there either. Tom had observed her from a distance, as he often did, as she attempted to insert herself into conversations, awkwardly trying to become a part of a world to which she only aspired but never truly belonged. It had been uncomfortable for him to watch at the time, but in retrospect, he believed it had also been the moment he fell in love with her.

  Tom Kendall did love Gloria Moody, even when it wasn’t even remotely appropriate to do so— when she was Edward Moody’s wife, and then suddenly his grieving widow. It wasn’t just lust that drew him to her, as some people later speculated. Even early on, there always seemed to be something more. There were plenty of other beautiful women who were not married, but with Gloria he always sensed a connection that he quite simply never felt with any others.

  When he hired Gloria after Edward’s death, he did so mainly out of a desire to be near her, and having achieved that, he bided his time. She had, after all, just lost her husband; he couldn’t possibly declare his feelings for her, no matter how profound or sincere they might be, at least until she’d been allowed a reasonable and respectable time to grieve.

  Tom Kendall was always the perfect gentleman, and he knew it was best to allow whatever was meant to happen between them to occur naturally. He waited a full year, and it was the most arduous and painful year of his life, made both more tolerable and more trying by Gloria’s almost constant presence.

  During that time, he observed as she grew more self-assured, both in her work and in her life. He witnessed the changes in her as she rebuilt her broken life, bit by bit. She’d been a lovely but unfulfilled young woman when she was married to Edward Moody, and in Tom’s opinion— which he wisely kept to himself— Gloria blossomed after Edward was gone. She smiled more easily now. There were moments when she seemed happier than she’d ever been, and in every expression, in every gesture, she appeared to be a woman who was finally completely at ease with herself.

  There was a brief period shortly after they returned from their trip north— when they drove leisurely around Lake Winnipesaukee to view the foliage, mostly in silence— when she withdrew, not just from him but from everyone. She’d been introspective during their weekend at the lake, and Tom knew she was wrestling with old memories of the husband she’d lost. He acknowledged afterward that it had been a mistake to take her there, where there were simply too many reminders of Edward, too many ghosts. He had no idea how deeply that day had affected her at the time, but for weeks after, it seemed that the funk she experienced that weekend only deepened. It was as if she was experiencing her grief all over again, just as profoundly as she had when Edward Moody first disappeared.

  Then one day, in late October, it was over as quickly as it had begun, as if it were just a passing storm that had engulfed her and then moved out to sea; as if someone had clicked on a light switch, Tom thought at the time. When it was done, she was almost instantly herself again, joyful and warm and ready to embrace life. Tom never asked her too many questions about those weeks when she’d disappeared inside herself. He simply appreciated her all the more when she returned.

  When she did, she seemed more eager than ever to spend her time with Tom. For the first time, she began speaking about the future— their future— something she’d previously always seemed reluctant to consider. It wasn’t just because Tom was capable of offering her the life of luxury she’d always wished for— in fact, she learned that she rather liked having a career— but because he was kind and attentive in ways that were simply foreign to her. At least in their last years together, which were the years she remembered most vividly, Edward was often distant and dismissive. He was never angry or mean or intentionally hurtful, just absent. She surprised even herself when she began to consider a life with Tom, but she realized she was ready to put her past behind her and begin again. She despised being a widow. She was looking forward to being a wife again.

  In the months that followed, their relationship developed from a tentative courtship to a bona fide romance. Tom was actually surprised at times at how fervently Gloria seemed to embrace their relationship. Where he was often cautious about moving things forward, fearful she might pull away from him and once again retreat into herself, Gloria suddenly was not.

  The first time they had sex turned out to be a completely spontaneous encounter, despite Tom’s constant state of anxiety leading up to it. He agonized incessantly about the timing of such an event, desperately trying to arrange things so it didn’t happen on the anniversary of any date that reminded Gloria of Edward, concerned it would jinx the act before it even started. He hoped to avoid Edward’s birthday (in August), their anniversary (in October) or the date he disappeared (in May), and he agonized over all those dates he was unaware of that he was certain would be sad for Gloria in some way. And, of course, whenever it happened, it couldn’t be in the home— and certainly not the bed— she’d once shared with Edward. The ghost of Edward Moody seemed to be everywhere.

  So Tom set himself to the task of planning a getaway to some neutral place at some carefully-selected time, believing the event must be carefully orchestrated if it was ever to happen at all. What he didn’t understand was that all of this anxiety was his alone; Gloria didn’t concern herself with such things. He learned this one Friday evening in December— three weeks after their courtship began in earnest, and just over a year and a half after Edward disappeared.

  They were enjoying a bottle of wine in Tom Kendall’s living room, and they were about halfway through the bottle when Gloria jumped him. They left a trail of clothing from the back door, through the living room and up the stairs. They never quite made it to the bedroom that first time, settling instead for the plush carpet at the top of the stairs. It wasn’t the romantic overture Tom Kendall had planned, but when they were finished, Tom retrieved the bottle of wine and their glasses from the living room and they spent the entire night in his bed, where they made love again an hour later, and a third time in the morning.

  So much for the ghost of Edward Moody, Tom thought to himself. He would have been surprised to know that Gloria was thinking p
recisely the same thing.

  It was during the following spring— as James and Jean anxiously awaited William's arrival, although Gloria would have no way of knowing that— when she discovered she was in love with Tom Kendall. It was a revelation for Gloria; it had been an eternity for Tom, who had known for years that he was in love with Gloria.

  Once Tom was more certain of Gloria’s commitment to him he became less worried that a single misstep might frighten her off or push her away from him. He planned romantic getaways to Vermont and upstate New York and Montreal. He always took her inland, concerned that even glimpses of the ocean might stir up old memories. He was no longer worried that she might pull away from him, only that such memories would spoil their time together.

  The only time he dared mention anything about the ocean was his suggestion that they take a cruise to someplace warm once winter descended on New England.

  Gloria just shook her head. “No boats,” she said.

  “Even a cruise ship?” Tom asked. “It’s more like a city than a boat.”

  “Then take me to a city,” Gloria said. “But no boats.” She remained resolute in keeping the promise she’d made to herself that bleak morning that Edward had disappeared.

  So when winter came, Tom whisked her away to Jamaica, where they spent a week at a resort in Negril. It was the life Gloria had always wished for, and seeing the blissful expression on her face as they dined on a patio overlooking the blue-green sea emboldened Tom, who promptly proposed. It was a fantasy he’d considered many times over the years, even when it seemed unlikely, but when he finally spoke the words it was a completely spontaneous gesture. He simply reached across the table, took her hand and blurted out the words: “Marry me.”

  Gloria smiled at him, as amused as she was elated, and she squeezed his hand. “Mr. Kendall”— it was how she often addressed him when she was about to correct him— “If you want an answer, you’ll have to ask the question.”

  Tom thought for a moment. He released her hand and looked about them at the other guests peacefully enjoying their meals amid the sounds of the surf and the steel drums. He folded his napkin and placed it on the table, and then he stood up, walked around to Gloria’s chair and lowered himself onto one knee taking her hand once again. “Gloria,” he said. He was unaware that all the faces at all the tables on the patio that had been oblivious to them a moment earlier were now turned in his direction. “I’ve loved you for as long as I’ve known you, and I always will. Will you marry me?”

  Unlike Tom, Gloria was well aware of the eager faces of their fellow diners. She smiled and caught the eye of several of them as she made him wait for his answer, as if including all of them in her little joke. Just as Tom began to show concern over her hesitation, Gloria looked him directly in the eye. “Yes,” she finally said. “Of course I’ll marry you.”

  Their first kiss as an engaged couple was met with the applause of their fellow diners, and the steel drums, which had been playing sweet Jamaican rhythms all evening, broke into a reggae rendition of “Here Comes the Bride”.

  They arranged to be married on the beach two days later, exchanging rings they’d purchased in the resort gift shop; Tom promised to get her a ‘proper diamond’ when they returned home.

  Once back in Rhode Island, Gloria realized she had two unpleasant tasks before her; the first was moving out of and selling her house, and the second, which she perceived as the more difficult of the two, was telling Kate that she’d married Tom Kendall.

  She decided it was best to tell Kate before she heard the news from someone else, so she invited Kate for dinner one evening after work a few days after she and Tom returned from Jamaica.

  To Gloria’s great relief, Kate appeared momentarily surprised and then genuinely pleased for her.

  “That’s wonderful!” Kate said sincerely. “I’m very happy for you… for both of you.”

  “I was worried about telling you,” Gloria said after a moment.

  Kate frowned. “You shouldn’t have been.”

  “I was afraid you’d think it was too soon.”

  “You deserve to be happy,” Kate told her.

  It wasn’t the reaction Gloria had anticipated. She’d agonized for days about how to tell Kate, certain there would be some judgment, some resentment, but there was neither.

  For Kate, the news came as no real surprise. That they’d become engaged and married within two days while on a vacation was unusual— she’d never imagined Gloria to be impulsive— but she was well aware of the romance between Gloria and Tom Kendall. She was actually pleased that Gloria had moved on with her life. She worried that Gloria might brood indefinitely, and aside from that being terribly unfair, Kate also felt some small amount of relief at hearing Gloria’s announcement, as if it might somehow ease her guilt.

  Once the announcement was made, not just to Kate and to Tom’s daughters, but to everyone, Gloria set about moving out of the house she’d once shared with Edward and into Tom Kendall’s spacious home in East Greenwich. Over the next several weeks, she packed her personal belongings into boxes; she sold or gave away much of the furniture. She was surprised at how little of her old life she wanted to take with her.

  Many of Edward’s possessions were still scattered around the house, and although she’d set aside a few mementos of her life with Edward that she planned to keep, there were several items— Edward’s trophies, plaques and photographs— that she offered to Kate.

  “They should stay with family,” Gloria told Kate when she arrived to retrieve Edward’s keepsakes. “It doesn’t feel right taking them with me, but Edward would never forgive me if I just threw them away.”

  She looked at Kate for what seemed like a long time, a long penetrating gaze, as if she were waiting for Kate to say something more, but Kate just touched Gloria on the shoulder and casually sifted through one of the boxes. She felt Gloria watching her for a bit, but when Kate finally looked up to say something to her, she discovered that Gloria had left the room.

  Gloria made very little on the sale of the house, but she was relieved that it sold quickly. She was surprised that parting with the home she’d once shared with Edward came without tears. For a moment, she almost felt guilty, as if she owed it to Edward to be melancholy.

  Edward had been proud of their home when they first purchased it. Those were happier times, when Edward believed it to be the embodiment of all the hope and promise he felt certain would come his way. He worked tirelessly on one project or another on the weekends— when he wasn’t otherwise occupied with the boat. But over time, as room-by-room Gloria made it her own— orderly and ornate and brutally absent of the wonderful chaos children bring to a space— it came to feel, like so much of his life, less like a home and more like an obligation. Looking back later, that house he’d once loved was quite possibly the thing he missed least of all the things he left behind.

  On her last day in the house, Gloria stood in the doorway looking out at the driveway, at the precise spot where Edward had been when she last spoke to him, and she remembered the lie that had been his parting words to her. Everything’s normal.

  From that day forward, nothing would be normal for her, but as she stood in that same spot where she’d been almost three years earlier, she thought about the new life she was about to begin with Tom Kendall, and the one she was leaving behind. It was impossible not to consider the irony of it.

  30

  What Comes Around

  It's often a small mistake— a brief lapse in judgment— that begins a series of events that spiral out of control. In early May, Joe Tibbits traveled alone to Bangor on a Friday night to sit at a bar and leer at the college girls before the spring semester came to a close and they all scattered for the summer. He had the misfortune of meeting a girl who reminded him so much of Jill Ouellette, the petite brunette he'd charmed— and later raped— at Slick Willie's in Lewiston that he couldn't resist asking her to dance. When she dismissed him
as a lecherous old man and then returned to her friends to mock him, Joe left the bar and sat in his truck biding his time until the girl finally emerged— alone, to his good fortune.

  As she walked to her car, he approached her quickly, grabbing her hair before she could turn around and slamming her pretty face into the window of the driver's door as she attempted to unlock it. When he turned her around and shoved her back against the side of the car, the blood was already streaming from her broken nose and into her pretty mouth, which suddenly had no appeal to him. She began to wail, both out of fear and pain, and Joe stepped back and pointed an accusing finger at her.

  "You think I'm a fucking joke, you little whore!" he shouted at her. "You're not laughing now, are you?"

  More people emerged laughing from the bar, and Joe hurried to his truck, as the girl covered her bloody face with her hands and slumped to the pavement, where her friends found her a few minutes later.

  In Joe Tibbits' opinion, his mistake wasn't the act itself— the girl clearly deserved what she got; she deserved worse as far as he was concerned. His mistake, as he would later see it, was in assuming that the brief and violent encounter with a random girl in Bangor would never find him in Rockland. He'd always believed those two worlds were separate.

  He was wrong.

  A month later, he was standing with Hank Welch and his crew in one of the local Rockland pubs on a Friday night when the girl wandered in with three friends. He recognized her immediately, her injuries having healed, and he turned away, cursing his bad luck. Of all the girls in Bangor, he'd had the misfortune of becoming obsessed with, and then assaulting, a Rockland townie!

  He chugged what was left of his beer and slapped Hank on the shoulder and attempted to make a quick exit before the girl saw him, but when Hank shouted after him, urging him to stay, the commotion caught the attention of the girl who stared at him for a moment before she recognized him. Seeing this, Joe hurried from the bar and disappeared into the night before the girl could point him out to her friends. But even if she could have summoned the courage to follow him, which would have been foolish, there was no need. She'd seen who he'd been drinking with, and she wandered over, accompanied by her friends.