by Jean Stone
She began to wonder if Brian was sick. She glanced at her watch: He'd been gone twenty minutes.
“Excuse me,” she interrupted Brian's squash-playing companion, “would you do me a favor and check the men's room? I can't imagine what's taking Brian so long.”
At that point in her story, Jo paused a long and quiet pause. Marion let out a sigh as if she knew what happened next. And then Jo raised her gaze to meet her mother's eyes. “Oh, Mom,” she said, “it was horrible.”
Marion reached across the table and took hold of Jo's cold hands.
Jo closed her eyes. “He wasn't there,” she said. “Charlie came back and said, ‘I think he flushed himself down the toilet.' He laughed, because I guess he thought it was a joke.”
Charlie had then resumed his seat and taken a swig of Brian's beer. He started telling Jo about a woman he had dated the night before, but then Jo snapped at him. “For godssake, Charlie, where is Brian?”
He flinched. “How do I know? Maybe he got a call. Maybe he went outside to use his phone.” It was noisy at McNally's, but no more than usual. And Brian had a good cell phone . . . Jo had paid for it.
And then Jo knew Brian wasn't coming back.
Sitting in her mother's kitchen now, in the home where she'd been raised, the place where she'd been protected, Jo could still feel the nausea that had rolled through her, the cold, slow wave of bile that said she'd been abandoned. Again.
She had tried to sort out her senses. She had tried to be logical.
Perhaps Brian had been lured outside, then robbed of his wallet.
Perhaps he'd been abducted by the jealous husband of a former lover.
Perhaps he'd been shot through the temple by an unhappy client.
Perhaps . . . a million and one things could have happened. But the hollowness inside her felt oddly familiar. She recognized it for what it was: abandonment.
She told her mother how at that moment she remembered a news story about an ordinary couple who had traveled to Atlantic City to celebrate their anniversary. While at the blackjack table, the husband excused himself. He left his money and his cigarettes on the felt top next to his wife. It was three years before the wife heard of him again. He had run off with another woman, in an act he had planned for several months.
Jo said that was when she stood up at the table and rushed out the front door, that her rational mind kept insisting there would be a simple explanation.
Brian would not have been mugged, abducted, shot.
Which meant he must have left of his own free will.
But he wouldn't do that, not again.
They had waited too many years to be together.
Brian, however, was not outside.
Jo had gone back into the pub and headed for the men's room. She threw open the door and shouted, “Brian?”
When no one answered, she pushed past the line of urinals while a man quickly zipped his fly. She slammed open the doors of two stalls, both of which were empty.
She returned to the table. Charlie had moved to the bar, apparently just Brian's squash-buddy not Brian's friend. She sat down again, her heart thumping bold thumps of fear.
An hour passed, and then another. She asked the bartender to call the police.
The police came. They wrote a few ambivalent notes. They told Jo if she didn't hear from Brian in forty-eight hours she should call Missing Persons.
Jo ended her story there. She did not tell Marion that she had invested all her assets in Brian's business. There was no point in sharing that.
When she signed the lease on the Shannon Drive apartment, Jo persuaded herself she was not ruling out the fantasy that Brian still might return. She rationalized that she was merely trying to rebuild her finances, her sanity, her life.
Two days later, when Lily was back in West Hope, eager to oversee the renovations to the shop, Jo steered her Honda up the ramp onto the turnpike. She followed the signs east toward Springfield, Worcester, Boston.
“We should have a trademark,” Sarah said from the passenger seat. “Something that will be distinctive to our business.” She had insisted on making the trip with Jo; she would visit wedding consultants and boutiques while Jo dealt with her movers; she would steal some ideas. Well, not steal, exactly. Just find out what was current, what was urban-hip. Jo had hesitated at first: She was so accustomed to doing everything alone, and she worried that somehow Sarah might learn the details of what had happened with Brian. But Sarah had persisted, and Lily urged her to go, and Jo couldn't think of a good enough excuse. She wished there was a convincing way to prepare Sarah for what she'd see, to explain the remnants of Jo's indulgent lifestyle and why they were no longer hers.
“What kind of trademark?” Jo asked.
Sarah flipped through the pages of a bridal magazine. “I don't know. A diamond baked into a wedding cake . . . custom silver earrings woven into the bridal bouquet for the lucky girl who catches it . . . something everyone will get excited about when they learn that we'll be the wedding planners.”
Jo smiled. “A diamond in a wedding cake. I like that.”
Sarah flipped another page. “Of course, we'd have to do it so it wouldn't be a liability issue. The last thing we'd need is to have to perform the Heimlich on the mother of the bride.”
“Or on the kids,” Jo added. “Remember that these will be second weddings. There might be lots of kids. Which reminds me, we should come up with a standard list of dos and don'ts.”
“Such as . . . Don't lick the frosting from the wedding cake? Don't play your Game Boy during the ceremony?”
“Very funny, but no. More like specific things for second weddings. Like, Do wear white if you want, and Don't wear a veil, wear a headpiece or ring of flowers instead.”
“‘Don't wear a veil'?”
Jo shrugged. “I read it in a magazine. I think some guidelines would be good. Etiquette stuff.” She did not mention that she'd read it months earlier, when she'd thought she might be planning a wedding of her own—a first wedding.
From Stockbridge to Natick, they kicked around ideas. Too soon they passed through the last exit; the skyline came into view. Jo's fingers tensed on the small steering wheel, the skin across her knuckles grew taut and pale, her jawline more pronounced.
“Well,” she said. “Here we are.”
If Sarah noted the change in Jo's demeanor, she did not comment. Instead, Sarah turned her face out the window and quietly said, “I never thought I'd be back here again.”
Jo could have asked what Sarah meant, but decided both of them were entitled to their secrets.
It was summer. The city should have been throbbing with kids darting up and down hot, steamy pavement. It should have been vibrating with roller blades that cruised along the bike path by the river, and been dotted by tourist groups and their guides giving brief oral histories along the Freedom Trail. John Hancock lived there. Paul Revere's blacksmith shop was there. The Old North Church still had the same bell.
Who could argue?
But Boston was shrouded in the eerie stillness that happened when humidity drizzled from a gray, friendless sky and sent even the duck boats heading for cover, in case the heavens cracked and thunder shook the ground above the tunnels now mazed beneath the city like Pavlov's labyrinth.
Jo stopped the car along the curb in front of Copley Plaza.
“I can't talk you into coming with me?” Sarah asked.
Jo shook her head. “You'll have to find the perfect wedding ingredients without me. I have too much to do.”
They decided they'd meet later at the Holiday Inn in Brookline—a little on the outskirts, but cheaper than the Ritz. If Jo had been alone, she might have slept amid the cartons at her former condo, but with Sarah there . . . well, the fewer white lies needed, the better.
Jo wished Sarah luck, then stole away, not in the direction of the condo, but toward the Boston Police Station Annex, Missing Persons Bureau.
It was not one of those buildings one mig
ht expect, of crumbling redbrick and dusty, arched windows that had been there a hundred years or more. It did not have a cobblestone walk that lead into a dark foyer where a crusty old sergeant sat behind a long wood desk that was elevated three steps to intimidate visitors.
Instead, the Missing Persons Bureau of the Boston Police Department was housed in a pristine new building with well-lit corridors and user-friendly directions.
Lieutenant Williams would be happy to see her, a young woman in a long cotton dress said to Jo. She gestured to a comfortable-looking chair by the wall, but Jo declined. She was not relaxed enough to sit. She tried to turn her attention to several notices tacked onto a wall, photocopies of faces, mostly of children who had been missing since July 1999, April 2003, October 1996. She scanned the information as if she were perusing ads at the market for housekeeping or lawn-mowing or gutter-cleaning services for which she had no need.
“Ms. Lyons?”
Lieutenant Williams was tall and good-looking, with a regal posture that spoke of hard work and respect. She wondered if he'd grown up in a black neighborhood in Roxbury, and, if so, what he'd had to do to make it to the top.
“Lieutenant Williams,” she said, extending her hand. His hand was large, but his handshake gentle, for a cop.
He ushered her into his office, a glass-walled room with tasteful furniture.
“Have a seat,” he offered, and this time, she sat.
He plucked a manila file folder from his desk. He sat beside her, not behind his desk. “As I told you on the phone,” he said, “we have someone working on a case in South America. A picture he sent back includes a man whom we think resembles Brian Forbes.”
Jo nodded. She thought about the photo she'd given the police. It had been taken at Mrs. Dotson's Valentine's Day party. It was of the two of them, Jo and Brian, reunited; Jo and Brian, all dressed up, in love. When Brian disappeared, she'd been so upset she forgot to tell the police it was the only copy of the photo that she had.
Her gaze fell from the lieutenant to the closed manila file folder on his lap. She remembered the red dress she'd worn, she remembered Brian's happy smile.
“The case we're working on is in Argentina,” Lieutenant Williams said.
She wasn't sure if he expected a reaction, a link she might know connecting Brian to South America. But she knew none. Not now, nor in the past months they'd been together. Before that, who knew? It had often occurred to Jo that in their twenty years of separation, she knew little of Brian's whereabouts, other than he'd stayed in Montreal for several years, then moved down to the Adirondacks in Upstate New York, where he'd worked at a hunting lodge. He'd become a local hero when he rescued a group of Wall Street investment brokers stranded in a snowstorm. Over scotch and venison, they convinced him to try his hand at a more lucrative business.
“Investments,” Brian often quoted one of them as saying. “It's where the money is.”
They'd laughed about those words, each time Jo wrote another check to help get Brian's business started. They had not laughed when she agreed to invest in a fund he believed in, because it was serious money then, the deal that would surely make both Jo and Brian rich.
The lieutenant opened the file folder. Jo's vision blurred; she blinked to focus.
“As I explained on the phone,” Lieutenant Williams said, “this was taken for another case. A man whose wife went missing with a bundle of his cash.”
He hesitated long enough for Jo to understand his meaning. A man. A wife. Brian in a photo. Brian in a photo with another man's wife.
Oh.
She sat up straight, unsure if she had moaned out loud.
She cleared her throat. “Let me see the photo, please,” she said in a voice that did not sound like hers, but was smaller, quieter, a voice lacking confidence.
He handed her an eight-by-ten black-and-white glossy print. In the picture was a long-haired, half-naked woman, laughing. She held a bowl-shaped glass that had a straw and a tiny, paper umbrella. Bending to the glass, taking a drink, was a shirtless man. The man had dark hair and flashing eyes.
But he did not have Brian's dimple deep in his left cheek.
10
The deadline clock was ticking.
Andrew roamed the halls of the administrative building of Winston College, wondering if it was too late to tell John Benson to forget it, to admit that Andrew Kennedy, alas, no longer had the stuff that it took to charm the opposite sex.
He had, after all, been in too much trouble with his daughter to risk being seen with any of her elementary-school teachers. Which left only a few obvious choices.
But the coeds were too young.
The professors were off-limits, unless he wanted gossip, which he did not.
The wives of the summer people whose husbands joined them for golf on weekends might be candidates, but they'd be gone when the season ended and where would that leave Andrew?
Practically the only women left would be the one who owned the laundromat and the one who cleaned the cottage, both of whom were nice enough, but way past sixty-five.
He strolled the empty halls. He considered that the morning's visit was not to seek out real women after all, but to find out if there was a class or two he could teach come fall. Maybe he should accept that this “sabbatical” ruse wasn't going to work, that he was no more capable of writing about women than about the mating habits of earthworms, if they even had mating habits. (Were they the insects who fornicated with themselves and produced squirmy offspring sans the aid—or pleasure—of a male/female bond?)
He thought about Patty and how, if he gave up the column, he'd have to forfeit the trip to Australia.
Outside the Graduate Office, contemplating that thought, Andrew grabbed the latest edition of Winston Words, the college newspaper. It was a scant four pages, due to the slack of summer. Still, Andrew felt guilty for having bailed out on his duties as faculty advisor in order to concentrate on his new career, which was quickly turning to shit.
He opened the sheet and his eyes fell to a large ad at the bottom of the page. The format didn't resemble that of any regular advertisers: It was bordered by illustrations of tall calla lilies.
RECEPTIONIST WANTED, the ad read in bold type.
Wedding consultants need mature, well-rounded individual to meet and greet prospective brides-to-be. Full-time position. No experience required.
A frilly logo at the bottom of the ad read:
SECOND CHANCES
Specializing in magical marriages
for the second-time around.
Another symbol then caught Andrew's eye:
An equal opportunity employer.
He folded the newspaper and stuffed it into his backpack. At least the paper was getting new advertisers, something that would surely help in these shaky economic times.
It was not until he'd left the administration building and was walking across campus that the idea of Second Chances lit up like a cartoon lightbulb high over his head.
Wedding consultants . . . mature individual . . . no experience required.
And then . . . an equal opportunity employer.
11
Video wishes,” Sarah said that night over dinner.
Jo knew she should be grateful for Sarah and her exuberance, and for the distraction they afforded from the rest of her lousy day. She tasted her sole français and asked, “What are video wishes?”
“We'll set up a small booth in a corner of the reception hall. Every guest is invited to step inside and record their best wishes to the bride and groom. It's great fun. Everyone is dressed up and looks their best. They're in a party mood, and it becomes part of the wedding memories. We have it burned onto a CD and voilà, they can pop it into their TV or computer and watch it time after time.”
“That's great,” Jo said. “What else?”
It was easy to feign interest, because Sarah was so animated, so energized by the city and by new ideas. But while Jo listened to such thoughts as “posy poc
ketbooks for bridesmaids,” and “confetti” of wildflower seeds and buds of dried lavender, she was very much aware of the shroud of anticipation looming ahead tomorrow, of the gruesome task of dismembering what had taken nearly twenty years to build and only five months to dismantle in the name of love.
“The most important thing we can do is hook up with certain vendors, caterers, florists, DJs,” Sarah continued. “That's where we'll make our real money, from a percentage of their fees.” Then Sarah smiled. “But the business side of things is your department, not mine.”
Jo nodded. She had already intended to seek out businesses with which they could have “partnering” arrangements.
“Tomorrow I want to go to Chestnut Hill,” Sarah added. “I understand there is a terrific bridal shop there. Are you sure you won't join me?”
Jo supposed the movers were perfectly capable of packing her belongings. They would not get caught up in the emotion of remembering where each item came from and who she'd been with and what fun she had or hadn't had. Yet to have her memories wrapped and sealed without one last look . . .
“No,” she said. “I really need to be at the condo. I won't have room for everything in my new apartment—I'll have to mark the things I'm going to store at my mother's.” It seemed a credible excuse. “Who knows how long I'll take. Don't wait for me for dinner.”
They finished their meal amid amiable chatter about Lily (“Can you believe that she goes on year after year living in another world?”) and Elaine (“I guess it's good that she's found another man”) and their impending business (“It's nice that we're all at an age and place that we can risk some things for the greater good, like the possibility that we won't have money to pay the rent or dump into our 401Ks”). That last comment had come from Sarah, surprising Jo that her free-spirited friend knew about 401Ks. Still, Sarah must have some business savvy to have designed and sold her own jewelry all these years. She did not comment that Sarah assuredly had more in her retirement than Jo, who now had none.