Ink and Bone

by Lisa Unger

  “Do you think you can find her?” asked Jackson. He sat up and put on his glasses. He was a towheaded Harry Potter, his face a beautiful, delicate mask of hope and still, even after everything, innocence. He still believed in happy endings.

  But the answer was no. Wolf felt with his whole heart that Abbey was gone; he didn’t feel her, not the way Merri claimed to. He knew what the odds were of finding Abbey alive. The truth was, he wasn’t going to The Hollows for Abbey. He was going because he needed to be there when Merri realized, too, that their daughter was dead. That someone had taken her because Wolf had failed as her father, her protector, and she wasn’t coming back. He had given up on happy surprises long ago.

  “I don’t know, kiddo,” he said. “We’re going to try.”

  “Did you ask Uncle Blake about the missing man?”

  “I did,” said Wolf. “He’s looking into it.”

  Jackson released a breath and looked up at his father. “Okay.”

  “Grandma will take you to school in the morning,” said Wolf. “And she’ll pick you up, too. I’ll call you in the afternoon.”

  “You’re going now?” Jackson glanced at his clock. It was nearly midnight.

  “I don’t want your mom to be alone up there.”

  Jackson nodded, seeming more relieved than anxious or upset as Wolf expected—which Wolf took as a positive sign that he’d made a good choice. He tried not to think about the fact that both his mother and his son had the same reaction, as if everyone was silently hoping that he’d do the right thing for once.

  He threw a few things in a bag and was on his way out the front door by twelve thirty. He was surprised, though he really shouldn’t have been, to see Kristi standing outside the building.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  He knew he sounded cold, but he didn’t have time for this, for her. Her face was blotchy from crying, her mascara running. It didn’t soften him.

  “What?” he went on when she didn’t say anything. “Were you going to ring the bell—with my parents and my son up there?”

  Something in her face shifted from hurt and vulnerable to angry.

  “This is what you think of me,” she said lifting up her phone, presumably to show him the text he’d sent. The street was quiet the way TriBeCa was at night. It was more of a residential neighborhood, and lights were dark, streets felt empty. It didn’t throb and pulse like the rest of the city. Her voice echoed in the emptiness. “You think you can just send me a text and that’s it. I just disappear like I never existed.”

  He couldn’t stand the sight of her. For the first time, he saw her for what she was, the bleach-blonde embodiment of all of Wolf’s failures and mistakes. His throat was thick; he had no words.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked. “Like I’m something you can’t scrape off of your shoe?”

  They’d met at a press party. She was the publicist for a luxury hotel group and was hosting an event at their new Manhattan property on the stunning rooftop bar.

  She’d been wearing a shift with sequins glittering on the front. He saw her when he first walked in; she’d greeted him at the door, looked at him with big eyes.

  “You’re Wolf Gleason,” she said. “I love your work!”

  She was just—shiny. Dress, nails, lips, eyes. Everything sparkled. Merri didn’t exactly sparkle anymore, certainly not for Wolf. Lately, it seemed like his wife only noticed him when she was mad about something he’d neglected to do. Mostly they just fought and shuttled the kids back and forth to school, and worked, and stood around on fields or sat in small chairs at parent-teacher conferences. In fact, there was very little sparkle in midlife, it seemed to Wolf. That was maybe, more than anything, what had attracted him to Kristi—that she wasn’t everything else. Of course, nothing sparkles forever.

  “Why did you tell me about that place?” he asked now. He’d been wondering about it for a long time, could never bring himself to ask. He didn’t even want to remember that it had been Kristi who first told him about The Hollows.

  She blinked, confused. “What place?”

  “The Hollows.”

  She blew out a breath of disdain, rubbed a hand to her forehead. “Not so that you would take your family up there on a fucking vacation.”

  Her voice had come up an octave, and a woman walking down the sidewalk on the street turned and stared, then kept moving.

  “Then why?”

  She shook her head, gave him the look that women always seemed to give him sooner or later—angry, disappointed, tired.

  “You don’t even remember, do you?” she said. Not really a question. “Because that’s where I’m from. I was trying to tell you about myself. But you never heard that, because you never gave a shit who I was, or am, or what I wanted.”

  Had she told him that? She was right: he didn’t remember. He never listened when she talked, kind of like the kids who tended to prattle on about nothing, some video game or drama with friends. They know when you’re not listening, Merri had chided a million times. We all do.

  Somehow, the name of that town had rattled around in his head until he Googled it when Merri said she wanted to spend a week “upstate.” They were considering buying a country house—or he was. Thinking it might be fun to check it out for a week, he searched around and found a New York Times piece “36 Hours in The Hollows” Pick apples at the Old Cider Mill; wander miles of gentle nature trails; breakfast at The Egg and Yolk; take an iron mine tour with a local guide and learn some history, yadda yadda.

  Wolf went to VRBO and impulsively rented Clarabel’s Lake House. It all happened inside an hour, none of the usual back and forth between him and Merri—should we, shouldn’t we, can we get away, aren’t we spending too much money? In fact, he didn’t even ask until after he’d booked it. She was happy enough about it, though. He remembered feeling like it was meant to be, the perfect getaway. And did they ever need it.

  Merri had been trying to wean herself off the pain pills she’d been prescribed for her knee surgery a year ago and was still taking. They figured she had the mettle to cut back until she could go cold turkey; and she claimed that she’d been doing that, cutting back. She’d planned to stop taking them altogether when they were away. (He had no idea that she’d brought a bottle with her, just in case. On the day Abbey disappeared, she’d taken three Vicodin before noon.)

  Wolf himself was still reeling from having his piece pulled from Outside magazine. The editor was a good friend of his, so things had been handled delicately. Some of your quotes can’t be verified; sources can’t be reached. Why don’t you get me those contacts, and maybe we can reschedule the piece?

  They needed a rest. The Hollows seemed like the perfect place to go to get some distance, some perspective. They’d come back refreshed, renewed—Merri would be well, he’d break up with Kristi, talk his way out of the Outside magazine thing. Everything was going to be fine. That’s how he felt as they loaded up the Range Rover and headed upstate.

  But he hadn’t even been up there a full afternoon before the place—the kids and all their incessant whining and complaining and Merri’s aura of enduring yet another thing that Wolf wanted to do and she didn’t—started closing in around him. He was suffocating before they even got to the lake house. The town—with all its precious (overpriced: Christ, it wasn’t SoHo!) shops and mediocre coffeehouse, and allegedly farm-fresh ice cream parlor—fell short of his expectations. He thought it would be somehow more. In fact, what was suffocating was that he thought all of it—his life, his marriage, his kids, vacations—should somehow be more. He had these grand visions of what things should be and it was never that.

  Life is not a travel magazine article, Wolf. One of Merri’s endless “grow-up” speeches. No matter where you go—no matter how the water sparkles, or how they serve champagne in flutes at sunset—you still have to haul yourself there, deal with all the moments in between, pay for it in the end. That’s real life—all the tim
e between those beautifully filtered images you post on Facebook.

  He’d texted Kristi while Merri was getting the kids some ice cream or something.

  I’m dying up here without you.

  Usually she texted him back instantaneously, as if she were always just waiting for him to reach out to her. This time she made him twist. She didn’t respond for more than an hour. Finally:

  who told u to go?

  I’m sorry. I miss you.

  Kristi had, just a few days earlier, delivered an ultimatum (which was one of the real reasons he was trying to get away from her): tell Merri, or she was going to break it off. End his marriage? Destroy his kids’ lives? For a girl like Kristi? Not going to happen.

  So he’d started distancing himself. Before her there had been flings, one-night stands, nothing lasting, nothing emotional. He’d expected her, like the others, to recede from the stage at his cue. But Kristi wasn’t having it. Lately, she’d been texting and calling, once even dared to ring the landline.

  Someone named Kristi Blaire? Merri had called that night, reading from the caller ID but not answering. She’s one of your press contacts, right? Merri was the least jealous, least suspicious woman he’d ever met. It was one of the reasons he’d married her. Anyway, the night of that call was when he decided they needed to get away. But up in The Hollows, fully immersed in “family time,” he found that he missed Kristi.

  With the kids finally zoning out in front of the television and Merri taking a shower, Wolf called her from the porch.

  “I don’t want to be without you,” he’d whispered, listening to the water run in the bathroom.

  He’d meant it in that moment. But what was it that he thought he couldn’t live without? It wasn’t about her, not at all. It was about how she made him feel about himself. She wanted him, needed him, admired him. She asked his advice, lapped up his compliments like cream from a bowl. She soothed him when he was angry. There was an expression Merri wore, a kind of tired scowl of disapproval that he’d never seen her direct at anyone else but him. When Kristi looked at him, it was the shiny look of love.

  “Maybe this would be a good weekend to tell her,” said Kristi. “I could come up tomorrow. After the kids are asleep.”

  It wouldn’t come as any surprise, would it? Merri must know the marriage was over. With the kids asleep in the loft, there would be little opportunity for drama. He’d leave with Kristi, and Merri could bring the kids home the next day. The details would be worked out later. Looking back now, he saw how insane it was, how depraved and utterly narcissistic. But that evening, he was an animal in a trap. Chewing off his arm seemed like a viable alternative. That was the problem, he reasoned. He was a wolf, a ranger, being asked to live the life of a Labradoodle. Domesticity was against his nature. Kristi, unlike Merri and the kids, wanted him to be himself.

  They made a plan. He’d tell her after the kids went to sleep the next night. Kristi would drive up to get him, and they’d go back to her place.

  “I love you, Wolf,” she said through tears. “I’m going to make you so happy.”

  “I love you, too,” he said. But the words felt big and fake in his mouth. He hung up, and Merri was behind him.

  “Who was that?” she asked.

  “My mom,” he said easily, turning around to meet her embrace.

  “The kids are asleep,” she said. “Crashed out in front of the television.”

  He smiled. “That’s an argument for letting them have televisions in their bedrooms at home.”

  She laughed. The nighttime routine of stories and putting the kids to bed had been the same since Jackson was born, hours of reading, and cajoling, and can I have some water, I need to use the bathroom, promises, threats, and finally silence.

  “This was right,” she said. The moon was high and the night was clear, the sky riven with so many stars. “It’s beautiful here and so peaceful. This is just what we needed. Thank you for planning it.”

  And just like that, he was back in her thrall. Maybe it was their shared laughter, or her relaxed look of happiness, or just the reality of the call he made and how it would shatter all the years they had together. Whatever it was, he felt that unmistakable tug he always felt to her, even when he didn’t notice it. Merri was a force, a planet with her own gravitational pull. He was her moon and had been since the night he met her. No one and nothing had ever thrilled him, excited him, challenged him, forced him to be a better man than Merri had.

  When they were sure the kids were well and truly asleep, they made love that night, and it was everything it had ever been and more. The porn he had with Kristi was theater. He knew she faked it 75 percent of the time. Merri was incapable of faking anything; she was the real deal. They shed it all that night—all the domestic cobwebs, all the million tiny arguments over nothing, all the boredom and the drudgery of running a life. Flesh on flesh, heart to heart. It was still there, that electricity of the first time, grounded in a life built together. How could he have imagined giving that up?

  “We can do better than we’ve been doing,” Merri said that night as she drifted off. “I can do better for us.”

  “Me, too,” he whispered. And he meant it. “God. Me, too.”

  He called Kristi as soon as he was out with the kids on the hike.

  “It’s not going to work,” he said. “Not here.”

  The silence on the other end of the phone was leaden with her anger and disappointment. Jackson and Abbey were lingering; he waved them up ahead. They both gave him a look, suspiciously confused. They knew he was doing something wrong, but they couldn’t fathom what. What had he been thinking? How could he ever dream of leaving them? It was a midlife crisis, wasn’t it? A sad cliché? That’s what he’d become, the man who couldn’t manage the mundane day-to-day of his life. Cage dive to see the great whites on the Barrier Reef in Australia, trek to see the mountain gorillas in Rwanda, zip line in Costa Rica—all totally doable. Fill out Valentine’s Day cards with his daughter, work with Jackson on his fractions for the millionth time, run out to the store at 9:00 p.m. because there’s no milk for the morning—utterly terrifying. Terrifying to think that really Merri was right: those things were the stuff of real life. Little more.

  “Then we’re done,” she said. Her voice was liquid nitrogen.

  “Kris,” he said. “What do you want me to do?”

  “I want you to do what you said you were going to do.”

  “It doesn’t have to be over,” he said. “I just need more time.”

  “Don’t.” And she hung up. That’s when the first shot rang out. The next one took him down.

  It was hard not to see it as retribution, a harsh correction for all his many failures. If he’d never met Kristi, he wouldn’t have brought his family to The Hollows. If he hadn’t been on the phone, his kids so far from him; if he hadn’t introduced Blake to Kristi, Blake would never have told Claire, they wouldn’t have canceled. If he’d never booked that cabin without asking Merri. The parade of “what ifs” and “if onlys” was endless. If any of those things had been different, the most horrible thing would never have happened. Or at least it might not have. He’d let too much space come between them. He’d let them out of his sight. That day and long before that. It was his fault.

  *

  The distant wail of a siren brought him back to the dim TriBeCa street.

  “I’m a person, Wolf,” Kristi said now. “You get that, right? I don’t just exist for your pleasure and amusement, to be shoved aside when you’ve used me up.”

  It was hard not to hate her. But at least he was smart enough to know that, really, he just hated himself.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. Those two useless words again.

  “Everyone told me, you know?” she said. She laughed a little. “That you were using me, that you would never leave your wife, especially not now. I really didn’t believe them. I really thought that you just needed time.”

  She looked up at the sky. “What a clich�
�, right?” she said when he didn’t answer. She lowered her eyes and smiled at him sadly.

  He saw her then, maybe for the first time: a young woman who was not blank, not vacant, but naïve maybe even a little foolish. If she had seemed empty to him, probably it was because all he saw in her was his own reflection. Poor Kristi was just in love with the wrong guy, trying to make something that started off cheap and tawdry into something real. Confusing him with the man she thought he was, she’d believed his promises, mistaken lust for love. She was just a little girl looking for the happily ever after, the redemptive narrative. She wanted to be able to say, “We had a rough beginning, but we came through tough times to find happiness.” But there was no redemption here.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I’ve made mistakes. A lot of them. What can I say? I have to be here for my family now. I have to try to fix what I’ve broken.”

  A siren wailed up the avenue. They both turned to look, then back at each other. He could tell that she almost understood, that she was glimpsing the truth about him, about life in general. That no matter how hard you tried, sometimes things were just as they were, not how you wanted them to be.

  She lifted her palms, a helpless tear drifting down her cheek. “But what about me?”

  “I never wanted to hurt you.” Wow. Did he really just say that? The only thing more pointless than “I’m sorry.” As if what we want or intend matters more than what we actually do. The truth was he never gave a moment’s thought to Kristi or what would happen to her in all this mess.

  He watched her for a moment; her eyes were glistening and she bit her lower lip. Was there going to be high drama? Would she slap him? Try to seduce him? Would she weep and wail as he tried to get away from her? Would he let her lure him back to her apartment, abandon his plans to go up to The Hollows?

  But no.

  “I hope you find your daughter,” said Kristi. She shook her head. “I really do. I can’t tell you how sorry I am that I ever told you about that place.”

  “It’s not your fault,” he said. “This is all on me.”