Since You've Been Gone

by Allan, Christa

  Somehow, some way, I would find the answers. On my own. I hadn’t told anyone about my playing detective. If and when I discovered something, I wanted to be the first to know.

  Propped up on the pillows against the headboard, my pint of Chunky Monkey on the nightstand, I opened my laptop to continue the hunt for where Wyatt might have been headed. He’d told Colin that he’d meet them at the bar. Taking into account the time the autopsy indicated Wyatt died, I figured his destination couldn’t have been much more than a few miles from where his car was found if he intended to be back in time. And I refused to believe that a man who hadn’t left his tuxedo behind didn’t plan to return.

  The accident happened off Highway 98, a stretch that ran from where we lived in Lake Morgan and the city of Oakville. The two-lane road ribboned between thick stands of pine, sweet gum, and beech trees, edged in places by water elms and wax myrtle and underbrush. A few miles just before Oakville, the road took a sharp veer to the right. The police told my parents the locals called the surprising turn Dead Man’s Curve for a reason. Driving on an unfamiliar—or one we presumed to be—road slick from an earlier rainstorm probably contributed to Wyatt’s car careening off the highway and into a patch of unforgiving forest.

  I fell asleep that night surrounded by pages of maps I’d printed and woke up to my laptop half under my pillow and a soupy half-empty carton of ice cream perched on my nightstand. The dust bunnies were already cavorting in the sunlight streaming through my shutters, so I must have hit Snooze on my cell phone more times than I thought. I needed to leave in the next fifteen minutes to stay on schedule, but my stomach wanted to stay in bed. Now that I knew I was pregnant, I wasn’t sure if my insides’ roiling was a classic case of morning sickness or simply knowing I’d be spending the next few hours retracing what I suspected was Wyatt’s route.

  I skipped putting on a face to have time to drive through PJ’s Coffee for my one allotted latte and a breakfast biscuit. My goal was to leave at about the same time I imagined Wyatt might have hung his tuxedo on the hook over the backseat window. I checked to make sure the neighbor’s kid hadn’t left his new hoverboard in the path of the car, then I backed out of our driveway and turned right onto Jackson Street, which led to Interstate 15.

  When my GPS chick announced that the exit to Highway 98 was two miles ahead, the steering wheel quivered beneath my trembling hands. Panic slid next to me, slipped one sweaty hand over my mouth and nose, and tried to shove me into a river of fear with the other. I pushed through. Refused to go under.

  At the exit was a gas station. I pulled off to the side past the pumps to a parking spot near the entrance of the Subway attached to it.

  I’d been driving for less than an hour, and in a few miles, I’d be there.

  There. The last place Wyatt was alive.

  Between here and there, the road lapped up the last moments of his life. And in those moments, what did he regret? Not arriving or not returning?

  CHAPTER 6

  The pristine day belied the treacherous curve ahead, making it seem all the more sadistic in its capacity for destruction. Negotiating the hairpin turn, I held my breath as if it could somehow make me and my Jeep smaller, more compact as the wheels crunched gravel on the road’s edge. I understood now how easy losing control could be, especially on a slippery stretch, to turn right around thick-trunked pines that jutted from scruffy-bottomed brush and not see that the road behind them folded back into itself.

  Once safely past the curve, I pulled over to a spot mottled with concrete and thick grass that looked like it could have been a driveway once. My skin felt two sizes too small. The car’s air conditioner was set on arctic freeze, but my internal thermometer was somewhere between hell and purgatory.

  I found the box I’d dropped into my purse before I left home, convinced myself that opening the car door was the only real way out, and demanded my feet hit the ground.

  I walked back to the gap of scarred and broken trees left after Wyatt’s truck had been pulled away. The few cars that passed me didn’t even slow down, as if a young woman moving through high weeds toward a fresh white cross in the swampy silt wasn’t unusual.

  I reached the spot where my parents, days after the accident, had left the cross with Wyatt’s initials. Brushing aside damp pine needles, a thin blanket of leaves, and assorted crud, I lowered my butt to the forest’s idea of carpet and sat cross-legged, twirling the brown box between my hands.

  Not that either of us chose to be here, but it’s June and the humidity is already pressing on everything, hot and heavy, like every angel in heaven turned on a steam iron at the same time. So I might have to make this quick.

  I wanted to come here to talk to you because, well, this was the last place you were alive. The mausoleum’s atmosphere just doesn’t do it for me. Besides, I couldn’t sit there and have a private conversation with you with the whole wall of people you’re with listening to me.

  I set the box in front of me, looked around the little wooded alcove and saw, for the first time, the broken branches and saplings. Some of the larger trees were gashed, their wrinkled bark ripped away exposing their smooth core. Funny. Wyatt’s death damaged them, too. I knew how that felt. To have your skin sliced open by the jagged edge of something unexpected, your insides turned outside.

  This is so much harder than I thought, but I have to do the hard things now. Alone. And I’m not happy about that. Because wherever you were going, for whatever reason . . . did it have to be the day of our wedding? Some people are saying you were a runaway groom. But I don’t believe that. I won’t believe that. I think that’s the one thing you would have been honest about, not wanting to marry me. But, I wonder now . . . why didn’t you trust me?

  I opened the box and took out our matching wedding bands. Both gold with a brushed center band and polished edges. Both inscribed with “I love you forever.”

  Colin gave my band to my parents after the non-wedding, who then gave it to me before Wyatt’s funeral. They thought I might have wanted to place both bands in the coffin. I thought that was entirely ridiculous.

  For days, I wore Wyatt’s band on my thumb. They thought that was entirely ridiculous.

  I told them we’d evened the score for absurd ideas.

  At first I considered burying our rings near this cross. That’s why I brought them here. But on the way over, I changed my mind. I don’t know how things work on your side of the universe . . . like you may get the breaking news before I do . . . but I’m pregnant.

  So, I guess you didn’t leave me all alone . . . Maybe our son or daughter will want these one day. Maybe not. I’ll let you know. Or maybe you’ll let me know somehow—

  I heard the sliding crunch of gravel and the thump of a car behind me. I hoped the thump meant it had stopped and wasn’t headed in my direction.

  Well, you sure didn’t plan for what to do when you were alone smack dab in the middle of nowhere, and your only weapons were two wedding bands, a box, and your not-so-genius brain for leaving your cell phone in the car.

  The first thing I spotted when I turned around was a shiny gold badge, which was enough to convince my stomach to work its way back up from the bottom of my feet where it had dropped.

  Actually, two shiny badges, one belonging to a ruddy-faced man with the physique of a professional wrestler, and the other to a tall black woman with close-cropped hair whose brown eyes scanned me before she said, “Excuse me, miss. Are you okay?”

  People generally never asked that question unless they already suspected you weren’t okay. My okay-ness in that minute, though, had more to do with being terrified I might be trying to figure my way out of someone’s trunk than what I looked like sitting on the side of the road as if I’d been talking to a tree.

  “Yes, I’m fine.” I stood and wiped the ground debris off my damp butt. My eyes bubbling with tears, and my face likely as pale as paper, I doubted what they saw matched what I’d said.

  They looked as cautious as
I felt, which was understandable considering the circumstances.

  “I’m Sergeant Gonzalez,” said the male officer. “This is my partner, Sergeant East. We’re with the Oakville Police Department.”

  She nodded, pointed to the highway, then looked back at me. “This really isn’t a safe place to be—”

  “Oh, I know. I’m Olivia Kavanaugh. My . . . my fiancé . . . well, had an accident here . . . a few weeks ago . . . on our wedding day . . .” I moved away from in front of the cross where they’d found me. “My parents put this here, but this is my first time . . .” The longer I talked, the less coherent and more nose-running, throat-constricting, hands-shaking I became.

  Their suspicious gazes shifted to sympathetic ones, their stances relaxed, but something about the telltale way they looked at each other unsettled me. I shoved my hands in my jeans and waited.

  “We’re both so sorry for your loss. We . . .” Sergeant Gonzalez eyed his partner, removed his black-visored hat, and, as if it were some signal between them, Sergeant East continued.

  “We got the call that day.”

  Realizing who I was must have filed the rough edges of her voice into smoother, softer tones, but what she said stunned me. Of all the patrol officers, these two had not only found Wyatt, they also found me. What were the odds? But it made sense; they worked in a small town. Probably a small force.

  The thoughts zapped through my brain, but my body moved in slow motion. “I don’t want to know,” I said, rubbing my arms to dispel the chill freezing under the surface of my skin, making the hairs on my arm stand at attention. “Please, no details.”

  Sergeant Gonzalez shook his head. “Of course not. We just wanted you to know we understood what you were telling us,” he said in apology.

  “We’re as surprised to meet you as I’m sure you are to have us find you. Your parents didn’t say much about whether you’d want to come here. We told them they could call us, after we gave them what we could, you know, so you would have it—the tuxedo and that gift—”

  “Gift? You gave them a gift?” What a strange thing for a police department to do when someone died.

  The two officers exchanged that look again.

  “The gift wasn’t from us. We found it in the back of the car,” said Sergeant Gonzalez.

  Why would Wyatt have a gift? My wedding present from him? Why wouldn’t my parents have told me about it, given it to me? My confusion seemed to make them nervous.

  “Guess they might have forgotten about it with all they had to do,” I said, though it felt like a question more than an answer.

  “Oh, I’m sure whoever that baby gift was meant for will understand if it’s late,” Sergeant East said.

  I reached for the nearest tree to steady myself. Shook my head as if the words I’d heard were jumbled, and if I could just rearrange them, my world would make sense again. Impossible. Unless he’d been suddenly endowed with a sixth sense, Wyatt couldn’t have known about my pregnancy.

  I recognized the churning in my stomach, the curdled coating that filled my mouth, and the sweat pulsing through my body that made me shiver. I bent over, my hands on my knees, but I couldn’t calm the acid waves in my gut. My breakfast landed between my feet. A putrid mess.

  I didn’t want to imagine what I looked like . . . snotty and gagging, wiping my face with my bare hands. My eyes stung, my nose burned, and my dignity deflated.

  Sergeant East scooted me away from the mess and lowered me to the blanket her partner brought from their car. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you,” she said as she handed me a box of wipes.

  “No. No. You didn’t upset me,” I mumbled and pulled out one of the little towels and swiped it over my face. Wyatt upset me. My parents upset me. This revelation upset me. “I must have gotten that virus that’s going around.” Sure. Pregnancy was always going around. Somewhere.

  “You want to come back to the station with us before you drive home? Rest a bit? Or maybe we could get someone to take you home,” Sergeant Gonzalez said.

  “I’m okay to drive. I actually feel better now,” I said, hoping I sounded more convincing than I felt.

  A squad car bringing me home might embellish the “jilted bride, deceased groom” stories. Give the neighbors a new twist. Then again, I might need to be taken away by the police after I finished talking to my parents. No need for them to make two trips.

  After escorting me to my car and supplying me with several bottles of water and their phone numbers, and my promising to call when I reached home, the officers headed back to their car.

  The rancid smell of vomit followed me to my Jeep. I started the car, opened the sunroof, then sat in a catatonic stupor during two songs with totally unrecognizable lyrics on the radio.

  In one of those moments when a flash of awareness lights up your brain, I knew what I had to do.

  Please still be here. Please still be here. Please still be here.

  They were.

  Whether waiting for me to pull away or just taking a break, the two officers hadn’t left. When they saw me running in their direction, Sergeant Gonzalez opened his door and looked behind me as if expecting to see a bear or a ghost chasing me.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” I said a bit breathlessly as I reached their car. “I changed my mind about going to the police station. I want to go.” I needed to go. “Are you going there from here? Can I follow you?”

  “Sure. It’s just about five miles up the road,” he said.

  I wanted to read the case file for myself. To not give my parents any opportunity to tell me I misunderstood.

  Less than an hour later, I was headed back home to Lake Morgan. But it didn’t feel like home. Home was a place where you were supposed to feel safe, protected, accepted. Not the place where lies lurked and truth was held hostage.

  On the passenger seat was the manila envelope with copies of the file. The copies that showed my parents signing off on having received Wyatt’s tuxedo and a wrapped gift. Sky-blue glossy paper with sailboats covered the box, which was about the size of a basketball, tied with oversize white and blue grosgrain ribbons that flopped to the sides.

  It wasn’t at all fair of me to blindside them, but they’d kept me blind for weeks. Just the picture of that gift sliced my heart open.

  Who was this meant for? Wyatt, who the hell were you? How much about you didn’t I know?

  Who could have guessed that the people I loved, who thought themselves so different from one another, ultimately became more alike?

  My parents and Wyatt.

  All three of them harbored secrets that were destroying my life.

  CHAPTER 7

  At breakfast the day after the fundraiser, Wyatt and I had found common ground in food, being only children, and each other. We entertained ourselves, mostly forgetting that Mia, Bryce, and Colin were at the table with us. He looked even more appetizing dressed in a starched shirt the shade of butter and jeans that hugged his body parts without being X-rated, topped by a smile that widened when we walked through the doors of the restaurant.

  When I dropped my napkin, we both leaned to retrieve it, and when his hand brushed against mine, I felt a shiver of electricity so intense, I could barely make eye contact for fear he would see the heat rising from my neck to my cheeks. And for fear he wouldn’t.

  After that, I wasn’t all that upset with Evan, who’d bowed out of the fundraiser the night before, making it possible for me to notice Wyatt. Evan and I had dated on and off for years, and having known one another for so long, we were comfortable together. His sense of humor was sharp and quick, his ability to schmooze my parents was legend, and he knew what delighted me: snowballs in the summer, hot chocolate in the winter, weekend trips to the beach.

  Sometimes I wondered if I loved the idea of Evan more than Evan himself. Because he was around, I never had to obsess over plans for the weekend or who’d be going to a social event with me. Sometimes, though, I wondered if knowing so much about each other robbed
us of that seductive mystery new couples experience. Then law school, studying for the bar exam, taking the exam, and waiting for his scores monopolized his attention more than the silver-sequined, strapless contoured minidress I wore for New Year’s Eve.

  Evan must have recognized the emotional distance between us because when we met for dinner, and I told him our relationship seemed like it was on life support, he didn’t flinch. In fact, he said he’d been interviewing with a firm, and he expected an offer soon, which meant we’d be seeing less of each other than ever. Our relationship died with dignity.

  Wyatt called a week later and invited me to dinner at his apartment. I was astounded that he managed a five-course meal in a kitchen about the size of my parents’ closet. How he managed to kiss me until I wanted our clothes to drop to the floor between us. And how I managed to leave fully dressed. Evan’s preoccupation with his new status as an attorney would have never been as electrifying as Wyatt’s preoccupation with kissing my collarbone.

  When my parents first met Wyatt, they admired his self-assurance, but his career path . . . not so much. My mother became expert at steering our conversations into the lane she’d named Wyatt’s Lack of Ambition.

  “Olivia, honey, don’t you think after all that financial struggling, he’d want more out of life than to be a cook?”

  In the beginning, my parents were surprised Wyatt and I continued to date. They had met him when we stopped in at one of the club’s Friday night buffets. When my mother or father didn’t recognize someone’s last name, it led to a slight head tilt followed by the question “That name doesn’t sound familiar to me. What does your father do for a living?”

  When Wyatt answered “Nothing,” I knew my mother was thinking he was either a trust fund baby or someone going after a trust fund baby. Fortunately, before she almost had to start chewing on her size-seven shoes, Wyatt followed up with, “I just wish he was living. He and my mother died more than eight years ago.”