Mia groaned. Or maybe she snorted. Either way, I suspected she was done. With me and with our conversation.
“Call me tomorrow. I’m going to hang up because Lily’s finished her bath, and I don’t like you very much right now.”
We were finally even. Because I didn’t like myself very much right then, either.
Thanks to Wyatt’s fascination with technology and Bluetooth, I didn’t have to fumble with keys or memorize numbers to open our—my front door. The lock and my cell phone talked to each other with more harmony than Mia and I had earlier, and voilà, I was in.
Since I had moved back after staying with my parents for almost two weeks, NASA might have mistaken my house for an unnamed star at night because I rarely turned off the outside lights and inside lamps. The lights comforted me. Reminded me that I was alive.
I put the leftovers in the refrigerator, where everything else languishing in it couldn’t summon the energy to be glad someone new joined them. They joined an unopened bottle of Champagne, a bottle of wine I’d uncorked two weeks ago, and an open-jawed pizza box that revealed four slices with their triangle points turned up like elves’ shoes, the veggies on them so glazed they looked plastic. A bowl of green grapes—most were on their way to becoming raisins. Two wheat bagels sat atop a block of cheddar cheese spotted with fuzzy blue-and-white mold.
None of these met the pregnancy nutrition guidelines the nurse had given me earlier that day. Neither did Nutty Caramel Swirl, the only container of Ben & Jerry’s in the freezer not spiked with icy stalagmites rising from the surface. But if I didn’t rescue it before it suffered freezer burn, it would linger in the ice cream graveyard with all the other flavors. The ones Wyatt and I had bought days before the wedding, laughing about having stocked up on our future late-night dinners in bed.
I grabbed a spoon, the ice cream, and my cell phone, then stopped in the laundry room to ditch my coffee-flavored sundress and pull on my girlie boxer shorts and a faded LSU T-shirt.
On the way to the room where I now slept, I bypassed the bedroom Wyatt and I had shared. I’d toted his pillow into the guest bedroom the first night I slept by myself in the house. Laying my cheek on the pillowcase, smelling the fading scent of him was the closest we’d ever be for the rest of my life.
But then came the day when my parents revealed more about the direction Wyatt was headed.
I hadn’t known that hours before the ceremony, Bryce had called Mia to ask if we had talked to Wyatt. The groomsmen were meeting at the Carousel Bar in the hotel before the photographer arrived, and Wyatt wasn’t there, and he wasn’t answering his cell phone. Colin told Bryce that Wyatt said he had one more thing to do, but he’d see them all at the bar.
My few calls to Wyatt had gone unanswered as well, but we’d spoken when we woke up that morning. I figured he was hanging out with the guys.
Days later, instead of waiting for a canoe to deliver breakfast to our bungalow in Bora Bora, I was serving coffee to my parents and their minister, who was helping us plan Wyatt’s funeral. My mother, who thought I might have been serious about dyeing my wedding dress black so I could wear it somewhere other than the hotel room, bought me a sedate black sheath. And, leaving nothing to chance, she took my wedding dress to the cleaners. I haven’t seen it since.
At first, my parents told only my grandmother that Wyatt’s car wasn’t headed toward the church when he’d been found. They waited until days after his funeral to break the news to me because, as they said, “It didn’t change the fact that Wyatt died. We didn’t want to heap still more onto an avalanche of so much tragedy.”
I didn’t believe them at first and wished they’d kept it to themselves, because knowing that changed everything.
After they told me, I came home that night, yanked off the pillowcase, and washed it. Later, fueled by rage and betrayal and too many glasses of wine, I rifled through every pocket of every piece of clothing in his closet. I hurled each one onto the bed when I finished.
Memories lingered in all those familiar things he wore. Soaked through my skin, coursed through my veins, and settled in my heart. The green-plaid flannel shirt he wore to the Christmas tree farm last year. His “No White Flags” shirt in honor of Steve Gleason, the Saints player with ALS, which he put on every time the team played. The blue linen Armani shirt that defined his broad shoulders and narrow waist, and my hands against his chest. Sometimes I had to toss things he’d worn before my hands felt scorched by so much left of him in them.
The clothes covered the bed in a tangled mountain of pants and shirts and jackets as if they’d been tossed out of a dryer. As I stared at the mess, my anger surged, pushed against my lungs until only my screaming provided relief. “What were you doing? Why did you do this to us? To me? Sometimes I hate you.” I stopped when I had shredded my throat raw.
I found nothing but aspirin-size fuzz balls, faded receipts from grocery stores, movie-theater ticket stubs, and more than twenty dollars in bills and change. I turned over every pair of shoes and shook them, unrolled socks because I remembered my grandfather hiding money in his, and dumped the contents of his dresser drawers on the floor.
My hands were sieves filtering the life he left behind, desperate to find one chunk of evidence, of suspicion, of mystery. My neck and back ached from hours of being hunched over the detritus of a man I loved who, by dying, had become a stranger.
Because if Wyatt hadn’t died on his way to me, then where was he going? And why? And who was he?
CHAPTER 5
After forty-five minutes of waiting, my grandmother arranged for one of the limousines to pick me up at the back of the church and deliver us to the hotel. My parents stayed, assuring me he could still arrive.
Ruthie convinced me to take off my dress. “You don’t want to look as if you’ve been rolling down the street when you walk up that aisle.”
I wanted to believe her. With the help of a Valium and tenuous hope, I imagined I’d be the bride I’d been planning almost a year to be.
Two hours later, my father sat next to me on the bed in the bridal suite, where I was cocooned under the covers in my monogrammed white jammies.
He still wore his tuxedo, but now anguish was etched in his forehead and eyes. One look at him and I turned my head. I didn’t want to hear what I saw on his face.
“Olivia, I need to talk to you,” he said. His voice was soothing, but I knew it belied the message he was about to deliver. “I just spoke with my friend Roger who’s with the Louisiana State Police. A call came in from Middleton Parish. They might have found Wyatt’s truck.”
I closed my eyes. Shivered under the layers of sheets, blankets, and down comforter. Pictured Wyatt’s crooked smile, the small scar over his left eyebrow, where he’d run into the monkey bars instead of over them when he was ten. The question I didn’t want to ask refused to be silenced. It grabbed my heart and strangled it until I couldn’t bear the pain and had to let it go.
“They didn’t find Wyatt?”
His answer was in the way his broad hand cupped my warm cheek to turn my face toward his and the gravel in his voice.
“We don’t know.”
I pushed myself up until my back rested against the upholstered headboard. “What does that mean? You don’t know if anyone found Wyatt? Is he missing? Or you don’t know if whoever they found is Wyatt?” I curled my fingers, my nails pressing like dull knives into my palms. I needed to feel something besides the emptiness that consumed me.
He looked above my head, and that’s when I realized my mother was standing near the bed. I stared at him staring at her. Turned to face her and saw her hold one hand with the other to stop them from trembling.
“What? What? What are the two of you not telling me?” With every word, my heart accelerated and my voice deepened.
My mother stepped closer to my father. She placed her hand on his shoulder like she needed to steady herself, not so much as a gesture of affection. “We’re telling you all we know, honey. A re
d truck went off the road someplace about an hour from here. An accident. From what they can tell, it involved only that vehicle.”
“Well, is Wyatt there or not?”
“Your mother and I are going there . . . to find out. We think it’s better if you stay here with Ruthie . . .” My father kissed my forehead. “We’ll call as soon as we know something. I promise.”
Wyatt was there. My parents identified him. I don’t know why the photo of him wasn’t enough. The one taken of the two of us at the rehearsal dinner just the night before. We were smiling.
Hours later, I don’t remember how many, they called. Ruthie answered since I was barely conscious between the Valium, not eating, and stomach-wrenching surges of grief and rage and bile.
I knew. I just knew he had died. There were only a few reasons Wyatt would not have been at that altar waiting and watching as my father and I walked down the aisle.
Right foot. Pause. Left foot. Pause. Just like the wedding coordinator had insisted.
He had either been kidnapped, fallen into a deep well, or he was dead. But our little town wasn’t a haven for terrorists, and we were already below sea level, so even if someone tried to dig a well, they’d hit water at three feet.
We all stayed one more night at the hotel. The thought of walking out the door terrified me. One step over the threshold, the one Wyatt was supposed to carry me over, meant facing a new reality.
At some point during the night, my mother handed me a glass of water and a pill. I didn’t remember much after that, so I guess it worked. Except that when I woke up, I wished it would’ve lasted longer. Weeks maybe. Sadness filled every pore of my body. I could barely breathe for the weight of it.
That morning Mia came to my room. I think it was mostly to give my parents and Ruthie a break while they ate breakfast. “They’re probably afraid to leave me alone. Like they’ll come back and find me dangling from the light fixture by my wedding dress.”
I sat cross-legged on the bed with Mia kneeling behind me pulling out the army of hairpins that Rory, my stylist, had tortured me with the day before.
“That’s ridiculous, Livvy. You’re too short to even reach that high. The best you could do would be to suffocate yourself in it.” She leaned over and hugged me. “What would you do without such compassionate friends?”
I smiled. Grateful that she talked to me as she usually would without resorting to the maudlin crap I knew I would be hearing for days.
She finished brushing my hair, then pointed the brush in my face as she lectured me. “You know, people are going to say incredibly stupid things to you. They mean well. Really, they do. So remember that before you’re tempted to unleash your inner gargoyle on them.” She pulled my hair into a ponytail and tightened it until I thought my eyebrows would move closer to my temples. “Unless, of course, they say something criminally idiotic.”
“And then I can pummel them into a pulp?” I loosened the elastic in my hair, then flopped back onto the bed and yawned. I wanted my heart to stop breaking.
“Hey, princess. You can’t stay locked away forever.” Mia tossed a pillow at me. “Time to get moving.” She handed me two plush towels on my way to the shower that she demanded I take. “And shower, no bath. I’m rusty on my CPR classes, so I can’t promise I still know enough to resuscitate you.”
I stayed with my parents after the wedding that never was because I refused to even drive down the street where Wyatt and I lived.
Once lived. In the house we’d bought barely two months ago in a neighborhood on its way to reviving itself after the hurricane. A neighborhood where houses still boarded up and marked by rescuers flanked freshly renovated shotgun doubles and camelbacks. Where we lived among artists and movie-set designers and the occasional petty thieves on bicycles. My parents wanted me to buy a gun for protection. Turns out, that wasn’t the kind of protection I needed.
Most days I vegetated in one or another of my worn college T-shirts and yoga pants or shorts, sometimes nights, too. If I couldn’t remember when I last showered, then I figured it had been too long, and I’d at least wash my face.
No one insisted I eat real meals, probably because I spent all day grazing. My old bedroom was a recycling station for smashed soda cans, bottles of too-warm beer, smudged paper plates, crinkled candy wrappers, empty Cheetos bags, hollowed-out pints of gelato, and anything else I could carry and consume. A few oversize bags of popcorn that advertised itself as “skinny” but totaled over six hundred calories. Two of those a day, and I could reach my recommended calorie count.
On the seventh day of sleeping, snacking, and the occasional one beer away from being overserved, God created the unceasing doorbell tune of church bells growing louder. My bare feet stuttered over the floor to my bedroom window. Granny Ruth’s new silver Lexus graced our driveway, so there would be no ignoring that insistent ringing.
After I examined my mouth in the bathroom mirror to make sure popcorn kernels weren’t lingering between my teeth, I squirted a dab of toothpaste on my tongue and plodded downstairs.
I opened the door and before the word hello could even make its way out of my mouth, Ruthie wagged her forefinger in my face as she elbowed past me.
“When you find my granddaughter, Olivia, the pretty one with the bright eyes who doesn’t smell like a locker room and who doesn’t dress like”—she pointed to me—“that, please tell her I’m here to take her to lunch.”
She always seemed to tower over me when I was younger, and even now, though I stood a solid five inches taller, I still felt like she was hovering above me. Lifted by her four-inch heels and her spunkiness.
“Hey, Ruthie.” I leaned over to hug her, but she backed away.
“Honey, no telling what you’ve been rolling around in.” She pointed to my T-shirt, mottled into a leopard print by food stains. “And you must be saving that bottle of Chanel perfume I gave you for Christmas—”
I mentally rolled my eyes. “I didn’t know you were stopping by. I just woke up . . .” My voice trailed off when Ruthie herself rolled her eyes as I spoke.
“Well, that’s almost a relief because I’d be mortified to know you’ve been prancing around town like that.” Hands on her hips around her designer jeans, she fixed her laser stare on me. “So, the first step in solving a problem is admitting you have one. I know because I paid my therapist a hundred and fifty an hour for that information. Now that you’ve admitted you’d still be in bed”—she looked at her watch—“at almost noon, we can do something about it.”
Ruthie locked her hand on my arm and steered me to the stairs. “You are going to resurrect my granddaughter. Be back down these steps in thirty minutes, then we are going to lunch. Someplace you don’t eat with your hands, so dress appropriately.”
Over spring rolls and Sesame Chicken at P.F. Chang’s, Ruthie informed me, sounding as if she’d just left a TV station news desk, “By the way, did you know there are over two and a half million weddings a year in the United States?”
I stirred my sweet and sour sauce and waited to hear what happened to the other two million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine brides. “No, I didn’t . . .” I answered and bit into my roll rather than bite my own tongue.
“Well, I didn’t either. But I found out that one hundred thousand of them end in broken engagements,” she said.
“My engagement didn’t shatter like some crystal vase on a marble floor. It was pulled off life support. It died.”
Ruthie told me the time had come for me to join the human race again. “Your parents think they’re helping you by letting you dance alone at your pity party. They’re only ‘enabling’ you, which is another pricey therapy term I picked up that I’m giving to you free.”
Maybe it was the throat-searing hot sauce, but more likely it was my grandmother’s assessment of my life that made me cough until my eyes were as soggy as my lettuce. I wiped them with the corner of my napkin.
“Seriously? You think
I’m being a drama queen when just weeks ago the man I was supposed to marry died? And I find out later he wasn’t even on his way to the church?” I impaled my chicken with chopsticks as I spoke. Mostly to avoid the temptation to use them as weapons, and I didn’t want Ruthie to see the anger that spiked in my eyes.
“Of course, you’re grieving. But you can’t bury yourself in it. You’re isolating yourself from those of us who are still here. Wyatt died. And we’re incredibly sad. But we’re watching you die a little bit every day, and that’s just painful.”
“What do you want from me? To pretend my life is wonderful? It’s not going in the direction I planned, and I don’t understand why this had to happen. Or why it had to happen to me.”
Ruthie leaned against the cushioned booth, pushed her plate toward the center of the table and grabbed me with her eyes. “Why you?” she asked. “None of us are exempt from terrible things happening in our lives. Leading a charmed life is a myth. Sooner or later, something will swallow us whole. And sometimes the only way out is like Jonah in the whale’s belly. We just find ourselves thrown up on the shore of something solid that we can build on.”
I handed my plate to the waiter who’d glided over to our table and who must have sensed the tension, because he simply nodded and walked away as quietly as he’d arrived.
“No Sunday-school Bible stories, okay? I’m already assaulted by Mom’s arsenal of scripture verses.”
“Livvy, I’m not expecting you to start singing the ‘Happy’ song or even forget what you’ve lost. But at least wake up in the morning, wash your face, brush your teeth, get dressed, and leave your bedroom. Call your boss at Virtual Strategies and tell her you’re ready to go back to work. Do something.”
And that’s when the idea that the “something” I was going to do would be figuring out the clues Wyatt left behind.
Nothing. I found nothing to explain where the hell Wyatt was going the morning of our wedding.
Who or what compelled him to drive almost fifty miles, his tuxedo in the backseat, away from home?
Since You've Been Gone Page 3